Lightweight plywood construction assembly : a lightweight approach to the elegant utilitarian form

What will be the fundamental aspect and concern of today's good design? As global energy reserves deplete over the coming decades, a strategy of reduced consumption will be essential to the production of furniture and architecture, alike. A lightweight design strategy is a way for designers to participate in reducing the environmental footprint of everyday objects. We are witnessing a Paradigm shift in design and the decorative arts of a magnitude not seen since the Modernist movement in the early 20th century. A design style embraces the combination of sustainability with building production. Today we recognizes that our resources are finite and that careful consideration should be given to the building process. Since ecological concern of materials become one of the foremost issues of today's building industry, For this project, I developed a lightweight and low-cost framing system that is collapsible and easy to assemble. My goal is to create compelling designs in the hope they will inspire people to choose sustainable design over safer and more traditional designs. Making building from thin bent plywood yields 9-10 times more usable wood from a log than making a building from hardwood lumber During the production of plywood, only 15 percent of the wood from a log is lost to waste. On the other hand , the average waste it takes to make a finished solid wood frame building is 1.5 times more wood than is used in the building itself! Bent plywood has been utilized by a mere handful of designer, most notably Alvar Aalto and Charles and Ray Eames, but the application of this material remained in furniture scale.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Architecture.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2009

Author dc:creator

• Kwong, Edmund Ming Yip

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Yung-Ho Chang.

• Architecture.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/49734

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/49734