Lightweight High Performance Northern Architecture (UWspace publication)
Super:Lightness proposes lightweighting as a means of providing high performance architecture in the Canadian North. The North faces compounding challenges as the climate of the region and the cost of resupply necessitates highly efficient buildings, while the construction of these projects is limited by these same challenges.
Super:Lightness presents a means of cutting through these problems,simplifying transportation and construction in remote communities, allowing for the construction of high performance architecture. The design process is highly analytical, quantifying component weights and modelling energy consumption to optimize the design.
This process can inform architecture at large, as the challenges of the North become relevant worldwide due to climate change, fossil fuel depletion, and economic limitations, making lightweight high performance architecture an increasingly impactful design methodology.
Northern Lightweight Architecture is a more limited application of the principles of Super:Lightness, making use of established best practices and simple novel construction methods to develop new best practices for architecture in the North.
Through study of the challenges in the North, and studying past and current building practices in the region, three key elements of transportability, constructability, and building energy performance are identified, with lightweighting as an important means of addressing these.
Considering this, precedents from alternative disciplines, and architecture in other settings, are studied as they relate to lightweightness and these key elements, informing building design in the North.
