RE
The Big Build is a design-build studio based in Hangzhou, China.
The studio provides students the opportunity to experiment, design, and build at full-scale while embracing mistakes along the way.
The Big Build will:
1. Provide students with the opportunity to learn critical skills in planning, design, and architecture in a concrete, practical, socially & ecologically responsible manner.
2. Cultivate students’ leadership skills by instilling professional ethics, personal responsibility for their design process, for team cohesion, self-motivation, and self-confidence.
3. Unlock the possibilities of the target materials, expand strategies of process and production, and enhance the capability of hand-craft, through a wide array of both hand and power tools.
PROVIDE
The Big Build pedagogy focuses on design and construction. The core principle is to think through making, where theory and practice and art are closely linked through the exploration of tools and materials. Students work alongside teams of professors, designers, craftsmen, and peers to realize their ideas at full scale. The Big Build tasks students to self-organize as a team, as they experience the hands-on construction of a real space.
Each year, the materials used in The Big Build are different. Participants need to analyze the source of these materials, which will also become the driving force for the design of form and structure.
In 2018, The Big Build construction material was bamboo. To use this material, we examine many aspects, including the growth process, the preparation methods involved in transforming it into a building material, strength and durability. By exploring the characteristics and cultural geography of material we develop strategies to design and construct in any medium.
Registration for The Big Build 2019 is now open!
