Students are building structures with the notorious suêtes winds in mind
By Nicole MacLennan
November 19, 2014, CBC News
Students are building structures with the notorious suêtes winds in mind
Dalhousie University has teamed up with three architecture schools in the U.S. to design and build structures in Cape Breton and learn from each other while they do it.
Professor Geoff Gjertson and students from the University of Louisiana Lafayette were in Cheticamp last month to meet with students from Dalhousie University’s Faculty of Architecture and see the structure they built this summer for the Cheticamp Farmers’ Market.
It’s part of a federal grant program from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Dalhousie has teamed up with the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and the University of Arizona.
“Essentially it’s a design, build exchange where each of the four universities are doing similar projects in their own communities and then we’ll be coming together to design and build a single structure in Nova Scotia in the summer of 2016.”
The students are building structures called gridshells, a unique curved design that uses thin strips of wood in an overlap grid format. The enclosure in Cheticamp was built with the notorious suêtes winds in mind. The students will monitor the structure over the winter to see how it holds up. Read more…