Aaron French

FORECASTING , FORTIFYING , FUTURING - The Crafters - Micro-algae Harvesting Station

Architecture - MArch

Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (ESALA)

alfdesignuk@gmail.com

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Perspective Section - Algae Processing Wing

Bio

The actuarist is a calibrator and modeller of futures, valuing crafting skills as assets. In a collaborative enquiry, acting as three crafters, limits were set to see what can personally be achieved, ensuring our making time is valued, as a method of exploring and critiquing scales and reach of production, consumption. What skills can a community of crafters hold, and in doing so how might new exchanges of productions be formed and extended? Questionings and practices are valued more seriously than instructions. Limits and potentials of sited architectural design are established as a series of moves rather than fixed endpoints. The Maryhill area of north Glasgow benefited greatly from the introduction of the Forth & Clyde Canal, growing from farmland to an industrial centre. Lost industrial activity also meant a loss of social and educational assets- trades work groups, industrial design academies, guilds- which has resulted in a desiccated demographic and high unemployment. The project seeks out robust remnants of the site of both River Kelvin and the community- energetic, physical and social - to re-value and re-build from. Futuring at a local scale is explored through three think-tank generators a twist on the Scottish bothy archetype and a cooperative working community that reassesses the value of labour. The programmatic principles of the project are based on the life essentials: housing, food and clothing. These have translated into self-build housing, a microalgae harvesting station and digital fabrication and innovation textile studio. Social, environmental and economic assets are questioned and measured through the exchange of time rather than money.

Collaborators

Ecological Axonometric- Futuring Site

The Crafters - Ecological Axo

Craft In Action

Craft In Action - Welding

Craft In Action - Tuning

Craft In Action - Recording

Craft In Action - Surveying

Craft In Action - Model-making

Craft In Action

Craftsmanship as defined in relation to this thesis is a form of work organisation which is defined in opposition to the industrial model – an outdated model where workers must be interchangeable, products standardised for more reliability, and where there is a one-best-way that can be replicated on a large scale to mass produce goods or services.

For something to be described as a craft, the workers concerned must have autonomy, they must also have a relative mastery of their tools, manage their own working time, be responsible for the result of their work, exercise a measure of creativity in their work and find a form of dignity in it. In the futuring of the selected territory the actuarist offers a solution to today’s methods of working and encourages a new way of viewing the rapidly changing economy. In centring the notion of engaging with making we can then question why value has been positioned in regard to money over time and skills.

Craft already contains within itself critical thinking that could not only help unpack its current situation, but that of architecture too. Thinking about craft also offers a different understanding of the architect’s place in the material world. When we engage in making, we realise our existence as part of an active material environment.

Site Assets

A key robust remnant of the site is the remaining railway footings positioned both to the north and south of the Kelvin dale Weir. There are numerous footings which continue the length of the River Kelvin and provide a possible futuring for the continual expansion or relocation of aspects of the project dependant on the comings and goings of Maryhill. [Re]imagining these assets through additive architectures enables a new signalling of use and demonstrates the capacities which they hold both physically and figuratively.

Existing Site Qualities

The Microalgae Harvesting Station

The Microalgae Harvesting Station is positioned and built upon the existing disused railway footings towards the south of the site. These remnant assets are extended to form towers that are integral to how the building is navigated and experienced, creating a new material asset within the landscape. The central tower is the main access point, another tower provides both the axis of stair circulation and a hollow courtyard. The final tower provides both circulation and a public viewing area of the microalgae production process.

Perspective Render North Elevation

Micro-algae Harvesting Station Floor Plans

02 Floor Plan

01 Floor Plan

-01 Floor Plan

00 Floor Plan

Roof Plan

External Render Showing Distribution Towers

The architectural language is experimental: manifesting itself through three core materials; brick, steel and timber. The proposal is also informed by the functional and communal clustered arrangements of buildings that previously occupied nearby sites. A bloated sense of capacity and actioning resonates with the microalgae harvesting programme, its bridged entrances and elevated circulation. An island in the Kelvin it anchors and hoovers over the sounds, senses and poetry of flow whilst joining in and providing its own poetic rhythm in site, architecture, engagement and purpose.

Central Section through Towers

Main Entrance View

Rendered External View - Photobioreactor Terrace

Programatically, microalgae as a crafted baseline provides a plethora of future offerings for our built and living environment. It is one of the world’s oldest and fasted growing organisms and does not put additional pressure on the environment, which is most applicable in an already stretched urban context. Through holding no requirement for fertile land, food, or processing energy to thrive; it can grow virtually anywhere and does not need clean water sources for production. With an ability to thrive in energy-deficient environments such as saltwater and sewage drains, all providing there is access to light. The automated microalgae photobioreactor production process harnesses algae’s ability to grow fast via photosynthesis in a harvesting process that cleans the environment around it via a C02 to Oxygen exchange. As well as a water cleaning ability. With a closed algae system there is the ability to enhance production via the reduction of evaporation.

Perspective Axo - Local Context

Two Way Perspective Section

Physical Model

Environmental Strategy

Microalgae also provide a potential solution to our fossil fuel crisis through the creation of bio-oils and gas when harvested that can be produced as a fuel replacement. Its harvested biomass can also potentially help solve the world’s plastic crisis through the creation of bioplastics which take less time to decompose unlike petroleum-based plastics and are both non-toxic and renewable.

As a potential food source of the future, algae contains twice the amount of protein as meat as well as being full of vitamins and minerals including iron levels over 50 times higher than spinach. Incorporated within the design programme is an experimental kitchen facility. The aim here is to provide a space where harvested biomass produced from the photobioreactors can be crafted into foods. A future initiative would be the fortification of foods with biomass.

The programme marries cohesively with the site and its sense of flow and convergence seen through the water. The constant motion of which illuminates notions of life. The building carries this essence, water passes beneath it and algae passes through it. It is quite an interesting notion to return to something so primitive, simple and natural as a means of forecasting for the future.

External Rendered - Materiality

Boat Makers Bothy Generator

The generator at Kelvin Drydock situates a decisively positioned building which is composed of a drafting space and shelter for a boat maker. The building acts as a capacitant for the futuring and re-establishment of the waterways. Additionally, the response also acts as a material testing ground to reflect those that are of the site, of the programme and of previous studio investigations. The building scissor lifts up and down to signify its occupancy status. This action poetically relates to the ebbs and flows of surrounding lock gates.

A metaphor for the design and its agency is “much like pushing a paper boat out to water”. It is this idea of giving society a nudge and a context a nudge into new ground or rather forgotten regained ground that is what the building and its purpose aim to provide.