(gentle music) -[Jason] Great architecture will raise our senses, you know, enhance our senses.

(gentle music) I started to appreciate the beautiful remoteness of this place, and I think in designing a building like this, what we hope to is to help other people appreciate that beautiful remoteness.

(gentle music) (gentle music) The initial stages, the concept design of this project, was really to set up the shape of a building, the concept of it being a micro-dwelling, and then to work with students over time, into developing those details.

(cart engine whirring) -[Doug] Well, you sit in the classroom and you do designs and you have papers and you do crits, right?

And they stand there and they look at it and say, "Well, this can happen, this can happen, this can happen."

Here, we come out here and we can physically touch what we built.

It's no longer a concept, it's a reality.

(orchestral music) -[Jason] These are the students that I'm working with here.

You know, we're just doing a few adaptations of it, but again, you get a good idea of how enthusiastic they are about building things here, (gentle music) about getting hands-on experience.

- This?

- Yeah.

- Yeah, we just need it even.

- Yeah.

No, that's good.

-[Jason] In Nebraska, in the Great Plains region, there's a deep tradition of people knowing how to build their own buildings and a strong connection between the land and architecture.

We are really indebted to the way that students are really passionate about doing things that matter to their community and doing things that matter to the places they come from.

It was really set up to think about the relationship between what we do in the architecture school and the state of Nebraska.

What we try to do is to find ways of making... Inventing ways of using trees, particularly within this part of the state and the type of trees that may get discarded.

Eastern red cedar is definitely one of them because it's regarded as being an invasive tree.

It's not.

It's a native tree, but it's regarded as being invasive.

(gentle music) We've looked for ways to use the eastern red cedar tree and other native trees in the most efficient possible way.

Even though we build most of this building out of Eastern Red cedar, we're also inventing new ways of using it for things like cabinets here.

We're using it for doors, we're using it for work surfaces like this, and that's part of the student's process of learning to use the whole tree.

(gentle music) -[Jon] What's important to remember about Mizer's Ruin is it is one aspect of a much larger partnership between architecture and Cedar Point Biological Station.

So I'm very interested in sort of portraying this image for a field station as being sustainable as possible.

And that plays in really well from our vision for the station, adding in these housing units.

(gentle music) -[Jason] Over 90% of it was built with materials that came from within one mile of the site.

What that does is help reduce what we call the embodied energy of the building.

Embodied energy is the amount of energy that it takes to bring materials from their location to the site.

So we've managed to calculate in this building that we're actually sequestering or pulling out of the atmosphere, 1.4 tons of carbon.

Now, if you took a building of an equivalent size built conventional construction, we'd probably be putting about seven tons of carbon into the atmosphere.

So when students are working on these projects, milling trees, cutting them up in a mobile mill that we have down here and getting them to the sites, they're directly invested in the energy flow.

(gentle music) We're not just producing a building, we're talking about materiality, we're talking about the rural context, and we're talking about what it means to consume materials when we're making architecture.

(gentle music) So we've been working on this building for the last four years.

There are a few finishing touches that we need to make and then we're going to be able to welcome visitors into this space.

And that's really exciting for us and really exciting for the architecture program and all the students that have been involved in this project.

(gentle music) (gentle music)