Society is confronting no shortage of crises, with climate change and housing access among the most critical. But the design community, undaunted, is responding with no shortage of thought-provoking ideas and new technologies, as evidenced by the 90 submissions to architect's 14th annual R+D Awards. Jurors Steve McDowell, faia, K.P. Reddy, and Ming Thompson, aia, evaluated each entry's potential to have a lasting, positive impact on the built environment and beyond-and its ability to, as Reddy put it, "iterate to something special." The resulting seven award winners have room to grow and scale while also "taking on fairly important and ordinary problems that the world is facing, or using data to help make better decisions for humanity," McDowell says. Despite the challenges we face, Thompson says, "these projects are all hopeful about the future." The "aha!" moment at the University of British Columbia's HiLo Lab came when researchers, intent on bending strips of wood veneer into unusual forms, stepped back to look at their elaborate setup. "We realized we could use the formwork itself as the member," says Blair Satterfield, UBC department of architecture chair and associate professor. + That breakthrough led to zippered wood, which leverages ordinary construction methods to create extraordinary structures with the humble 2x4. "We thought about the project both formally, in terms of what we can achieve cheaply and quickly with standard studs, and also in a performative way, in terms of efficiency and strength," says Marc Swackhamer, assoc. aia, who chairs the architecture department at University of Colorado, Denver and co-founded HouMinn Practice with Satterfield. + Starting with a cross-cut saw, the team created kerfs along 2X4S, enabling them to bend and twist. Using Grasshopper and the Kangaroo plug-in, they modeled the results and then wrote software protocols to map tooth patterns to specific curvatures. They upgraded to a CNC mill to cut teeth into 2X4S in such a way that two separate pieces of wood would lock or "zipper" only when they are hand-twisted together into the desired position. The mated pieces are clamped and glued to form a curving composite member with the dimensional cross-section of a 2x4. "Anecdotally, these bent and joined members are much stronger than a straight stud," Satterfield says. + To demonstrate their project's potential, the team built and exhibited two full-scale prototypes on the UBC campus in 2019. Most exciting, Swackhamer says, is the "democratizing potential" of a technique that broadens the possibilities of stick-frame construction.
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