The 100-Mile Building: Bioregional, Biogenic Architecture

In the urgent drive towards decarbonisation of the building industry, architecture and engineering practices must address both operational and embodied carbon. Yet although operational energy consumption has long been a concern for architects in the US, embodied carbon has only recently become a focus of building codes and regulations. To respond to these moral and legal obligations, increasingly more tools are available to assess embodied carbon, but aspects of material selection and specification remain opaque including the complex factors of environment and social harm resulting fro extraction, production and transport of building materials. Aiming to overcome these challenges, the authors posit that architects should maximize the use of bioregional, biobased building materials. To explore this idea with students, the authors co-taught an elective course focused on the implications of material selection with the goal of empowering soon to be graduates with the know-how and ambition to trace material histories and design with local, natural building materials, a project we termed the 100-mile building. This paper discusses the pedagogical methods and outcomes of two iterations of the course, concluding with a discussion about an expanded research agenda on the application of the 100-mile building strategy.