On Building, Ethics, and Architectural Education

Abstract

JAE 75:1 of cities. In the 1940s, the urban geographer and University of Toronto professor Griffith Taylor drafted a theory of the evolution of cities based on the different construction technologies and materials. He looked at the city of Toronto’s evolution to prove that older building techniques don’t simply disappear but are displaced by new ones which are cost effective but require higher building expertise. Gentrification pushes older building systems towards areas where their lower labor cost can be of some advantage in building working-class neighborhoods.3 Mentioned both in Cronon’s and Taylor’s urban studies, the material history contained in the fire insurance maps of North American cities remains uncodified by urban scholars. In the formation of younger cities like Toronto, stone buildings were uncommon because they were too expensive, and timber and brick structures constituted the majority of the building stock. The city’s plan to use brick residential buildings as firebreaks failed due to their greater cost compared to the balloon frame. This is a consideration that can help us visualize the technological gap between upper-middle-class and low-income neighborhoods and its impact on urban safety (Figure 1). After the Grenfell Tower fire in London in 2017, we need to ask: how wide is the technological gap between social and market housing today? The work of Cronon, Taylor, and Agyeman offers insights for the design of new curricula more aware of the environmental and social impact of mass-employed building technologies. insights into the environmental impact of specific building technologies across multiple scales. His studies on the evolution of the city of Chicago and the Midwest explain well the role that the commodification of natural resources, such as white pine, played in establishing Chicago as the world’s largest wood market at that time.1 It was in Chicago that the builder Augustine D. Taylor, taking advantage of the introduction of standardized lumber and nails, developed the two-by-four balloon frame system that became one of the most used building technologies in North America. Timber structures remain one of the most widely used building technologies in North America and mass timber is opening up new opportunities to scale up wood building structures—but what is the larger environmental impact of wood building? When considering current building practices, how do architecture and urban scholars account for deforestation and soil exploitation in the evaluation of mass-produced timber structures’ sustainability? In the late 1990s, planning scholar Julian Agyeman introduced the concept of “just sustainability” to address the increasing exploitation of resources—including timber— by richer countries.2 When a large percentage of the timber used in construction is imported from poorer countries, how can architecture schools help richer economies rethink building technology to tackle the ecological debt caused by environmental colonialism? By looking at the distribution of types of building structures across neighborhoods it is possible to understand the social organization