Collaborators: Juliana Berglund-Brown, Inge Donovan, Kiley Feickert, Keith Lee

MIT SA+P, Building Technology - Digital Structures Group, advised by Professor Caitlin Mueller

Project Brief: 


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.