Crisis Fronts1.0 | Pratt

Crisis Fronts 1.0 Studio | Pratt Institute | 2008Spring
Michael Chen + Jason Lee with Gil Akos + Ronnie Parsons

Crisis Fronts is the Degree Project studio and seminar run by Michael Chen and Jason Lee, with Gil Akos and Ronnie Parsons at Pratt Institute’s School of Architecture.

By many accounts buildings account for more energy consumption and contribute more to global climate change than transportation and industry combined. The impending climate crisis will bring significant changes in natural systems worldwide ranging from coastal flooding, desertification, widespread loss of biodiversity, disease, drought, fire, and extreme weather events. While current efforts to control carbon emissions reduce energy consumption, and increase efficiency of manufacturing and agricultural practices will contribute to slowing the rate of global warming, temperatures will continue to rise until more radical measures are undertaken at a significant scale.

Global warming directs our attention to the climate but also to architecture. Considering the built environment’s prominent contribution to planetary warming, systems and phenomena such as weather can no longer be considered to be exclusively “natural”. The previously accepted binary of artificial and natural requires a different set of exchanges. Human activity, and particularly the measures to enclose, illuminate, and condition that activity, to transport and control it reinforce a direct linkage between human settlement and climatic change. Projected further into the future, architecture and weather may no longer be simply distinguishable from one another and architecture must be equipped to perform as its own environmental system, reinforcing rather than denying its capacity to enter into a dynamic exchange of energies with the climate. Such a meteorological approach has the potential to redefine the material, organizational, programmatic, and performative dimensions of architecture.

Situating the work of the studio in the context of climate change is to acknowledge the preeminence of the front as a condition of particular interest and one that has both architectural and meteorological implications. Rapid shifting boundaries between land and water, cultivation and wasteland are not only the most immediate and obvious indications of the extent of the climate crisis but fluxual regions of turbulence and non linear behavior. That these boundary fronts are typically the site of extreme economic disparity, contested exchange between public and private territories, and the site of programmatic and technological innovation arising from necessity will require a more broadly considered, more radical environmentalism that embraces and exploits the full range of complexity that emerges within the region of frontal flux.

Architectures negotiating the dynamic front must embrace a greater term of longevity and must simultaneously navigate the extremes of a nomadic climactic, a changing contextual environment, and a contingent occupation. Projects in the studio will be conceived of not as envelopes or scaffolds, but as climactic techno-ecologies unto themselves, capable of navigating and withstanding the extremes of frontal migration, taking advantage of new and future technologies with potentials to mitigate the underlying factors contributing to global warming, and actively augmenting the performance of the opportunistic programs and patterns that will emerge. These patterns are understood to comprise a complex social feedback system and will afford the opportunity for speculation on new forms of material intelligence, formal innovation, new social practice, institutions, leisure, commerce, and piracy.

In this context, currently existing consumer-based and product-oriented approaches to “green” architecture are insufficient to adequately confront the full range of complexity posed by the climate crisis and its effects. Similarly, discrete and purely localized technical approaches to mechanical systems or energy production must also be reconsidered, as do any of the contemporary approaches that deal exclusively with a static or fixed climatic and territorial context. A more radical and speculative approach will be necessary.

Collaborative Research
Students conduct research in collaborative teams on a series of climate crisis topics including desertification, coastal and storm flooding, and polar melt. Additionally each team selects a series of performative precedents for study in the form of technical components and emerging technologies and materials relevant to their selected crisis front.

Methodology
Projects in the studio are conceived of as intelligent and responsive structures and begin with a study of material computation in the form of iterative and algorithmic modeling techniques to test the relationship between geometry and technical performance in the selected technical precedents. These performative ranges are further explored digitally, first representationally, and then algorithmically through scripting in Rhinoceros. The algorithms constitute a particular form of intelligence as well as a specific morphogenetic logic. Particular emphasis has been placed on developing a highly precise understanding and control of the behavior, emergent tendencies, and of the performative attributes of each geometrical system. The studio is situated with the intent to explore the potential at the intersection of computation and sustainability.

CrisisFronts Website