Extreme Environments III : Future Contingencies
The realities of climatic change challenge the temporal perspective of a design culture that has become increasingly short-sighted. As the environment continues to evolve over the next few decades, we and our buildings will exist in radically different environments tomorrow. Changes of up to 3° are predicted to occur as early as 2050 and dramatically alter the living world. Operating at the crest of these evolving environments we will investigate scenarios projected by climatic forecast simulations. The charge is neither one of infrastructural mitigation nor of ‘visionary architecture’ but an exploration of designs situated within these impending environments. In a reciprocal methodology, we are interested in how these shifting contexts impact proposals and in turn how the co-evolution of environments and buildings might effect social, economic and political situations. These situational affects are most applicable in or around some of the largest cities where changing climatic hazards may promote mass migrations.
Although strategically positioned to address potent climatic issues, we strongly encourage design based research projects where the architects’ role surpasses political and strategic policy and engages spatial, temporal and organisation potentials. Our design research consists of investigations into formative and evolutive design techniques which develop rule-based metasystemic conditions between buildings and their contexts. The unit research prompts: Lamarckian enviro/cultural evolution of designs, simulations of temporal ‘aging’ in buildings and their ‘growth’ within their environments, and semi-predictive calculations of future contingencies. The investigation of contingencies further promotes designs capable of coping with a multiplicity of future conditions, rendering singular performances and components obsolete. In contrast to primitives we seek the investigation of indeterminate composites with the potential of co-possible organisations and behaviours. The unit’s ultimate intention is to understand the built environment within the complexity of temporal projections and how the shifting cultural perspective impacts the spaces we currently design.