Student work from the Lithic Legacies ED4 studio @faumanitoba , taught by @ingedonovan
Lithic Legacies addressed the ageing-out mid-century civic building, reimagining its material inheritance in light of 21st century resource exigencies. Many of these public buildings were built as singular works of civic investment, their design signaling monumentality, endurance, and a vision for the future tied to ideas of progress and renewal. The studio centred around the development of an adaptive reuse proposition for the Public Safety Building, a brutalist structure built in 1966 in downtown Winnipeg to house the city’s police force. The PSB was controversially demolished in 2022.
After researching material flows and externalities and experimenting on the scale of the assembly, students worked on speculative proposals for the building’s concrete frame, developing tectonic propositions that developed strategies for the material reuse of the building’s limestone facade while creating a public community centre.
Featured are three projects by @jamiewaeltner , @ryleighbruce , and Silas Clark.
1 - Final exhibition, featuring a large halfscale model used for experimental development.
2 - Demolition of PSB in 2022 (Matt Shewster)
3 - Facade before and after (Silas Clark)
4 - Facade intervention axo (Silas Clark)
5 - Interior and exterior render showing concrete frame (Silas Clark)
6 - Final model (Silas Clark)
7 - Final model, floor plan and spatial logic diagram (@ryleighbruce )
8 - Final model interior close-up (@ryleighbruce )
9 - Facade collage render (@jamiewaeltner )
10 - Urban axonometric (@jamiewaeltner )
11 - Interior perspective showing structural intervention (@jamiewaeltner )
12 - Sections and exterior render (@jamiewaeltner )
Cold Storage is a proposal developed for the Winnipeg Warming Huts competition, reinterpreting the prairie icehouse as a contemporary winter shelter.
Drawing from the waterfront’s working history, the project harvests, stages, and stacks ice blocks within a timber frame to construct a field of frozen volumes that temper wind. The historical logic of insulation is inverted: rather than preserving ice, the ice itself performs as enclosure.
Inside, straw bale benches insulate and organize a communal room and a lightweight scaffold frames a lantern, glowing and drawing visitors across the winter landscape.
#WarmingHuts #Winnipeg #IceArchitecture #DesignForReuse #FutureAssemblies
Excited to share a glimpse into our full-scale beam prototype testing at Amrize.
Using custom-cast concrete loading blocks designed to match the beam profile we were able to incrementally apply maintenance loads and closely observe deflection behavior in real time.
The final image captures the beam fully disassembled, showing the reusability assessment in progress.
#DesignForDisassembly #DesignForReuse #StructuralDesign #Prototyping #CircularConstruction MaterialSystems
Visualizing Pixelframe coming together in a series of animations, showing how to build, unbuild, and rebuild the system.
Developed for Climate Week NYC 2025 and animation led by @rnlefevre #designforreuse #architecture #design #engineering #dfd
As the world urbanizes, demand for building materials is projected to grow, with the total mass of concrete expected to surpass the total living biomass on earth by 2050. Despite this growth, the design and construction of concrete buildings has barely changed since the early twentieth century, with emphasis placed on speed.
Sand, aggregate, cement, and water are augmented by admixtures developed to facilitate ever-hastening construction and secure concrete’s position in an economic model reliant on fast production, unskilled labor, and inefficient buildings whose viability hinges on rapid low-quality construction, with up to 10% of raw material wasted.
To reduce waste, the efficiency of structures must be improved—high-carbon materials should only be used where they are necessary, carving them away where they have no function.
Pictured:
Aldo Favini’s AL.FA shaped slab during installation in a warehouse in Trezzano sul Naviglio, Milan (Favini Archives)
Pixelframe beam half-scale prototype and full scale disassembly
#design #architecture #materialefficiency #designforreuse #archive
We’ve been working with Amrize Canada to produce full-scale prototypes of the Pixelframe system - and recently completed a series of successful load tests. The first (pictured here) was a manual maintenance load test with shaped concrete loading blocks cast to perfectly match the profile of the beam, allowing us to weight the beam gradually to observe deflection. #designforreuse
A collaboration with @kiley_fi@keith_j_l and @juliana.bb within @digitalstructuresmit , Make/Shift proposes a system that takes advantage of the non-standard lengths of recovered black locust stock to defy orthogonal norms and create a structural system that embraces variability and flexibility, enclosing a space for storing second-life materials and hosting educational workshops.
This structure breaks from the standards of
conventional stick-framing: multi-part “stud” frames are nailed together and transformed into arches, battens are forced out of horizontal alignment due to the set lengths of the stock pieces, and shingles register the underlying variation on the exterior.
Through computational sampling, assignment, and analysis, the design space created by the constrained inventory is applied to a flexible system, where any selected geometry is guaranteed to be
structurally efficient for point loads acting at the joints of the frame. A new design ethos for the circular economy also requires reversibility, materializing in Make/Shift’s simple moment connections that can be disassembled to
allow the structure to be moved, repaired, and reconfigured. #designforreuse
We are excited to share in-progress images of our full-scale prototyping from this past weekend. Our team tested the fabrication and cutting of modules designed for spans up to 20m.
These modules will form part the inventory designed to be reused in future prototypes, from demonstration to testing, and ultimately as a part of a pilot structure.
Designed for repeated reassembly and relocation, they challenge the notion of buildings as permanent endpoints for extracted materials.
#buildingcircularity #designforreuse #designfordisassembly #modulardesign
A material bank for the future of construction and circularity. Can we use digital infrastructure to surface new material intelligences and enable circular economies at scale?
As part of From Liquid to Stone at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale @labiennale , we were invited to contribute a digital material passport system for Pixelframe, a modular precast construction system developed by @future_assemblies and @digitalstructuresmit at @mitarchitecture .
We created a mobile platform that catalogs each Pixelframe component through tagged RFID chips. Visitors can scan any element in the installation to access its full material record, revealing its carbon emissions, fabrication history, and movement across sites and assemblies.
#biennalearchitettura2025 #intelligens
We are so excited for the public opening of the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Carlo Ratti, this weekend! @labiennale@crassociati
This exhibit is centered around our prototype of Pixelframe, featuring (re)assemblies and scale models demonstrating the tectonic possibilities of the system.
This work has been made possible by the generous support of MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium, MIT School of Architecture and Planning, MassCEC, and the Digital Structures research group @digitalstructuresmit
Participants:
Inge Donovan @ingedonovan
Jenna Schnitzler @j_schnitz
Caitlin Mueller
Keith J Lee @keith_j_l
Pitipat Wongsittikan @pitiwongs
We’re excited to share more about the digital material passports interfaces developed in collaboration with @spolialab , more coming soon!
It takes a village!
#BiennaleArchitettura2025 #IntelliGens
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#architecture #photography #computation #design #art #italy
Pixelframe began with an idea: what if concrete building frames could be re-designed to be taken apart and reused? This goal is in many ways antithetical to the conventional design of concrete structures, which are usually cast in place with rebar interconnecting all parts of the structure, making reuse basically impossible.
This is where modularity comes in: segmenting elements such as beams or columns into smaller pieces allows them to be reused as elements of any length. The system is further modularized in each segment – the shape-optimized base unit (the pixel) can be assembled into a variety of different cross-sections.
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#design #architecture #engineering #prototype #modularity #designforreuse #dfd #concrete #precastconcrete #posttensioning #decarbonization #demandreduction #research
We are so excited for the opening of “From Liquid to Stone,” our exhibit in the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale that is centered on a prototype of Pixelframe. Existing simultaneously at the scale of the detail and that of a global material exchange, the exhibit encourages discovery both through haptic encounter and through a digital interface that sheds light on the many past and future lives of building components.
@digitalstructuresmit@mitarchitecture@spolialab
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#architecture #engineering #research #design #designforreuse #dfd #materialefficiency #prestressing #precastconcrete #concrete #concreteconstruction #venice #venicebiennale
