Olivier Faber
Olivier is an enrolled student in the Master of Architecture. Originally from France, he studied architecture in Switzerland and graduated from EPF Lausanne (EPFL). While in exchange at ETH Zurich (ETHZ) during his senior year, Olivier worked under the professorship of Dirk Hebel on building for disassembly and urban mining. Since then, he has worked at various design practices, such as De Rosee Sa in London, UK, and Rahul Mehrotra Architect in Mumbai, India. Besides this, Olivier dedicated the academic year 2017-2018 to self-driven research on the historical development of energy infrastructures in cities and the ever-changing relationship between architecture and the societies in which it sits. Since at MIT, his research has been primarily focused on designing for climate justice.
As the list of cities pledging to reach carbon neutrality is ever-expanding, it is time we wonder: how will we ever get there? Considering the immense quantities of carbon embodied in the existing building fabric, demolition is hardly an option. This project takes as a challenge to work with what's already built — however quirkily and imperfectly — and devise building-specific strategies for meticulous low-carbon retrofit.
This project attempts to transform our understanding of waste and material use, taking the culture of plotting in architecture school as a case study: collecting about 70kg of discarded plotter paper throughout MIT School of Architecture and Planning and building a student exhibition pavilion out of it.
