Emanuel Jannasch Instructor BEDS, MArch (TUNS) Background The most distinctive characteristics I bring to the school are hands-on experience of a wide range of building technologies and substantial credits in film design. Making I worked for many years in all branches of carpentry and woodwork, and have some level of experience in every conceivable building trade and in a few related technologies. I have also experienced a steeper historical gradient than my half-century suggests. My first mentors, of my grandparents' generation, lived and worked without power tools in an essentially pre-industrial, subsistence mode. As teenagers in that world, our first building tools were crosscut saws and axes. Work steadily became more mechanized until in my thirties I found myself rebuilding high-industrial 35mm movie cameras for computer control, and then doing some building purely in the virtual realm. One of the strengths of architecture at Dalhousie is that we consider technology in its historical, environmental, and social contexts, and I am glad to contribute to that understanding. Art Direction I was attracted to film design because it offered scope for technical and visual creativity not always needed in conventional architecture. Def-Con 4 was the first locally made feature with major art department ambitions. Margaret's Museum and New Waterford Girl were both important in bringing Maritime life and Nova Scotian cinema to national attention, while The Conclave required historical reconstructions of a scale and richness unparalleled in the Canadian industry. Film design holds several important lessons for architecture. First, even the most ordinary place must be regarded as a dramatic setting. Second, set designers need to collaborate with masterful lighting designers, and are asked to contrive optically sophisticated space. Film construction also involves a whole palette of specialized materials and techniques. Curiously, I found that working in false and characterless materials required a more careful study of form-making than is needed when you can rely on authentic materials and process to give appropriate results. Finally, to construct a complete and believable world for the camera is a meticulous study in material culture. Research I am interested in the post-industrial future of building and how new technologies can recapture some of the depth of knowledge lost to industrialization. I am concentrating my research on our culture of wood, which embraces forestry, sawmilling, and the lumber trade, as well as wood engineering, architecture and construction. Buildings and forests have co-evolved, and I believe that a socially and ecologically robust culture of wood must be developed systemically. Can we co-restore complexity in woodlands and wood building? That is my long term and multifaceted investigation. Tools On the most practical end, this question means developing new kinds of computer driven machinery. Architecture schools have borrowed computerized tools from sign-makers and machine shops, and these have led to certain kinds of formal study, but I believe that as architects we need to build our own equipment suited to the scale and complexity of our own medium. Besides, the Vitruvian profession of architecture, which includes cranes, clocks and catapults, is a lot of fun. Forestry Contemporary forestry is looking for a balance between exploitation and conservation. Some feel that this opposition of economics and ecology is itself unhealthy and I believe that the idea of co-restoration can help to heal this polarized condition. On the research end, co-restoration means working out exactly how demand for particular kinds of lumber shapes our forests, and how available lumber shapes our buildings. What kinds of forests do we want to have, and what kinds of building practices support such forests? History of Technology I am interested in what engineering historian Richard Harris calls the grammar of carpentry, the unwritten ordering principles of construction that evolve over time and that define distinct lineages of practice. I envision a notation that allows grammars to be compared with one another and traced over their development. This should enable a more concrete and detailed account of the co-evolution of forest structure and building construction. Distributed Factory For over a century architects have dreamed of factory-made buildings. I have always been intrigued by this obsession, and how it seems to disregard the realities both of the factory and of the building site. In fact, the standard model - the site-assembly of building parts drawn from a decentralized network of factories - is more highly industrialized than many modernist proposals were. I also believe that design-based co-ordination of such a network offers interested architects a more powerful position in the building industry than they have ever held. Any realization of my research work will depend on a design-driven distributed factory and will hopefully contribute something to its development. Embodied Information A concern with the relationship between natural and artificial form and between natural and artificial patterns of organization underlies all my thinking. I have come to understand and describe this evolving relationship through a concept of "embodied information." I find it to be a useful idea in coming to grips with this so-called information age, and I continue to refine it and apply it to a variety of questions.