Dust To Dust: Embracing Entropy Through Organic Building Materials

Abstract

Architecture has had a complicated relationship with time. Some architects have chosen to embrace time, while many have chosen to oppose it. Fearful that passing time would overcome their work, many modern architects attempted to suppress its effects. In the commercial realm of today, that fear can largely be characterized by not wanting to be “behind the times”. Commercialism has bred a practice of planned obsolescence that reflects the dynamic, living organism of society, but fails to see buildings themselves as organisms. Our building practices have contributed to an immense amount of waste that is detrimental to our environment. This thesis will test architecture’s ability to embrace the process of entropy through organic building materials and explore the scalability of these methods in the “res-economica” of Washington, DC. This will be applied to three different affordable housing and homeless supportive housing typologies.