FOREWORD TO THE STUDIO – Architecture and the Climate Emergency
Architecture has always been a response to climate, whether benign or extreme. From the earliest primitive shelter, human design has not only been led by the need for survival, but has also been driven by ingenuity and optimism. Man’s creations have always strived to bridge the gaps between a harsh environment and the safe, liveable spaces we require.
Today, the climate has become less forgiving and is only getting more so. Over the past decade, climate change has accelerated in ways that defy even the best scientific models. 2024 marked a grim milestone as Earth registered its hottest temperatures on record, pushing global averages beyond the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C target. In the fires of Los Angeles, the floods of Valencia and Sherpur, the droughts of Sicily, we have witnessed the elements attacking us with unprecedented ferocity.
When the knowledge and systems that have long guided our understanding begin to fail, new forms of thinking are essential. For decades, ever since we started counting carbon, architecture’s response to the climate crisis has been centred on mitigation - on reducing our impact on the climate. That approach is no longer enough.
Architecture must move on from mitigation to regeneration, to reconnect with its longer history of adaptation, and rethink how we design for an altered world. While it is essential to create new solutions that speak to the challenges of the present, it is also important to recognise meaningful precedents that demonstrate the convergence of intelligences, and we need to learn from indigenous and First Nation practices as much as we do from the technological advances of the “modern” world.
Adaptation demands a fundamental shift in architectural practice.
Background
“With visitors and tourists expecting higher levels of service, information and retail opportunities, visitor centres have become a vital component in providing access to heritage sites, historic buildings, landscapes of natural beauty and monuments. As a consequence, numerous architecturally renowned centres have been designed and built in recent years.
Many of these centres have been featured in architectural awards, as they not only offer a ‘jewel’ of a project to architects, being small in scale but high in profile, but the buildings must also respond sympathetically to a rich physical and cultural context.”
Ruth Dalton. Taken from Designing for Heritage: Contemporary Visitor Centres 2018
Our project this semester is the design of a new Visitor Centre at the arrival point to the Biosphere 2 project outside Oracle, Arizona. The centrepiece of the site is the famous Biosphere 2 building, designed and built in the 1990’s as an environmental laboratory and “prototype for sustained off-planet living”.
It remains in use today as an advanced research centre run by the University of Arizona, making use of the complex and comprehensive infrastructure to “explore the Earth’s future to understand today’s environment and prepare for life beyond our planet”. It is an extraordinary place but it lacks a front door, a face to the world and a place to tell the incredible story of the non-scientists who came together to make this project happen, and to project the ground-breaking research work that continues to happen in what is the “World’s largest Earth Science Experiment”.
As Architects and Engineers, we are trained to be optimistic about the future, we believe we can make a difference to people’s lives, we can leave our cities or existing buildings better than we found them. The news at times can feel quite overwhelming and a constant reminder that we are living on a fragile planet. Rather than considering how or why these things have happened, we choose to focus on what we as Designers can do to find lasting solutions to the greatest challenge of our time.
For a generation we have focussed on reducing the carbon emissions associated with the operation of our buildings – developing passive design solutions to minimise operational carbon (the carbon emitted in the life of our buildings), without really considering the embodied carbon (the carbon emitted in their construction) as a serious issue.
The recognition of the climate emergency that we now face has brought into sharp focus the importance of the emissions caused by our activities right now, this in turn has led to an awakening of the need to better understand the impacts of the materials and methods that we use to build our buildings and to target and enumerate embodied carbon as the most important criterion for our designs.
This is the essence of our project. Your challenge is to produce an inspiring contemporary proposition for an Arrival building and Visitor Centre for Biosphere 2 that through your own research and ingenuity uses low carbon materials in intelligent and appropriate ways to deliver a high-performance building or complex of buildings.
Your architecture must respond not only to the climate and place, but also to the materials that you choose to build with. Beyond carbon, we want you to root your project in regenerative design thinking and continuously ask yourself “in making this decision am I being a good ancestor”?
We will travel to Arizona to learn from pioneering projects that explore living in harmony with the Earth, to see what lessons we can learn from them. We will travel to the Sonoran Desert and visit the Phoenix Botanical Gardens by Christy Ten Eyck, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West and Paolo Soleri’s enlightened plans for future city living at Arcosanti. We finish our travel week with a visit to Springs Preserve in Las Vegas, built between 1997 and 2007, a centre that showcases low-carbon design and construction in desert climates.
Using the very latest environmental and 21st century construction techniques we aim to create a new Visitor Centre for Biosphere 2 that draws from the experience of Regenerative Design to create a self-sustaining centre of excellence where Visitors, students and scientists can learn from the past and present Biosphere 2 learnings. It could also provide a place for the brightest minds on the planet to gather to explore new ways to design for better tomorrows.
We aim to create a studio that will be inspiring, inventive and thoughtful, with projects that shine a light on architectural responses to the challenging times that we live in.