RPI Students and Faculty Design and Build Rise, Repeat

RPI students and faculty, led by Leandro Piazzi and Claire Moriarty, recently participated in the Bethel Woods Art and Architecture Festival, which took place September 11 – 15 on the site of the historic Wookstock festival. Participating RPI students include Preston Kwok, Zonglin Li, Eric Diaz, Emily Zheng, Eben Negro, Camilla Dominguez, Isabel Montes, Marcy Sushynski, Chantal Celis, Gunnar Thuss, and Isaiah Mercer.

Rensselaer collaborated with Georgia Tech to create Rise, Repeat (shown above), an installation designed to enable disassembly and reuse.

According to The Architect’s Newspaper, the Rise, Repeat team describes their installation:

“The pavilion makes use of three off-the-shelf elements commonplace in everyday American domestic construction: (1) pressure-treated, pine stair stringers, (2) precast concrete deck footings, and (3) stainless-steel, star-drive deck screws. The repetition of uniform, pre-fabricated elements allows for an economical budget and ease/speed of assembly in the field. Stringer elements are joined mechanically with screws, without the need to cut or modify the elements and without using adhesives or coatings. This light-touch construction method allows for a strategy of disassembly and re-use, considering the full life cycle of the pavilion’s materials. After the three-year installation at Bethel Woods, the pavilion can be dismantled and relocated to another site or dismantled and donated to community building organizations in the area to be re-used as gently-used stair stringers in conventional construction. In this way, the project serves as a modest testing ground for a reusable, circular approach to architecture and its materials.”

Read the full article here.