Traveling Michel Serresâ Passage du NordOuest: what happens, once the ice breaks? A reflection on architectural research conducted between the humanities and engineering.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper investigates the complex design process for sustainable buildings mediating between spatial composition and architectural typology on one side and thermal, climatic conditions and energy use on the other hand.The theoretical base is Hermès V Le Passage du Nord-Ouest (Serres, 1980) by the French philosopher and mathematician Michel Serres (1930 -), where he is searching for a passageway from the exact sciences to the arts and humanities.While both are looking to explain the world with their own methods, they are turning their backs at each other.The shipping passage in the North of Canada connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific serves him as a metaphor for this complex thought space linking, connecting and dividing, these two explanations of the world.This text is dealing with the connection of places, which seemingly are separate: rigidness and phantasy, myths and exactness, quantitative and qualitative knowledge.Based on this understanding the paper analyses the design process between architecture and engineering as a passage passing four overarching theoretical frames crossing between geometry and perception, drawing and material, atmosphere and typology, technology and desire thus befriending quantitative and qualitative methods of design thinking.The research analyzes a built experiment, the Interlock House, which focused on the relationship of spatial composition and air flow as a means of energy transfer, the impact of passive and active environmental controls and systems on architectural design and improved building energy performance.The means to travel the passage: proportions, thermal detailing, natural ventilation strategies and daylighting are here identified as key moments for sustainable design.Design communication for sustainable buildings needs to convey information between multiple entities with opposing language systems and thus equals a map rather than a flow chart.A collaborative design methodology emerges from these passages when the ice breaks.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".