“The Systemless Project: UBC” Studio led by James Huemoeller
Existing UBC South Campus Warehouse
James Huemoeller will be teaching the “The Systemless Project: UBC” graduate comprehensive studio at UBC SALA alongside John Bass, Joanne Gates, and Amanda Reed.
From wildfires to heat domes to flooding, the climate change related events experienced over the last two and a half years here in British Columbia and worldwide underscore this studio’s focus on resiliency. In response to the reality that carbon emissions will continue to increase, along with temperatures, sea level, and unpredictable weather events throughout the 21st century, the studio invites you to fundamentally rethink material resources, systems and human behaviours embedded within the built environment.
Resiliency in architecture is grounded in the meaningful consideration of material resources, most of which are entangled in the complexities of extraction, manufacturing, transportation, assembly and disposal, and more encouragingly disassembly and reuse. Factors to consider include embodied carbon, local sources rather than global, repurposing rather than new, passive means to provide for reasonable comfort throughout the year, broader ecosystems in which the health of all things is considered.
This is what we have termed the “systemless project,” an architecture of care that prioritizes the health of the planet with local acts that invite careful consideration of site and circumstance to shape architectural resilience.
The systemless project will be explored through a food security hub located at the South Campus Warehouse between UBC Farm and Pacific Spirit Park within the UBC south campus. The existing building, roughly 160’ x 113’ in size, dates from the 1940’s and has a colourful history of re-use. It was first used as a military facility at Jericho Beach, then was dismantled and moved to UBC to be used as a field house containing tennis courts, and was finally relocated in 1968 to the current site for use as a warehouse. Today, three fifths of the building is still used for storage, with the remainder a set building workshop for UBC Opera. The heavy timber structure, originally sourced during the leaner war years, lent itself to being re-assembled these multiple times. The systemless project aims to reimagine this structure once again, this time as a greenhouse research facility affiliated with nearby UBC Farm with a focus on food security.
Interior structure of the UBC South Campus Warehouse