Transforming Single-Family Neighborhoods: A Climate Action and Social Equity Mandate

In many fast-growing cities around the country, up to three- quarters of the land zoned for residential use is reserved for detached, single-family dwellings at suburban densities. This is both a climate justice and racial justice issue as it has the doubly negative impact of artificially constraining housing supply and driving up costs, forcing many lower and middle income families farther away from job centers and imposing on them long, costly, and carbon-intensive com- mutes. Single-family zoning was also used as an explicit tool to segregate the U.S. by race starting in the 1920s and, in the process, denied countless people of color access to home- ownership, the most powerful wealth-building tool available to U.S. families. This is a significant factor in the stark racial disparities in household wealth that we see today.This paper outlines the findings of a nationally cited report on single-family zoning released by the Seattle Planning Commission, which advises the City Council and Mayor on land use and housing policy and of which the author is a member. It also reviews a collaboration between the com- mission and a graduate research-based architectural design studio and seminar co-taught by the author. This collabo- ration re-envisions urban, single-family neighborhoods to be more equitable, sustainable and livable while engaging students in a national policy dialogue in the process. The results of the studio will advance the commission’s efforts to advise Seattle’s elected officials in revising public policy to be more aligned with the city’s climate and racial justice goals.

Designing for Degrowth: Architecture Against Climate Apartheid

This paper challenges architects to consider a political economy that allows for social and ecological sustainability in the practice of architecture. At a time that bears witness to scores of radical proposals for re-shaping the field, we have the opportunity to reconsider the foundations of the field, and to pinpoint systemic injustices in which the building industries are complicit. In engaging a conversation about alternatives to a market-driven design field, this paper opens up a conversation about the ethics of sustainable design as it’s been practiced under the prevailing growth-driven economic model, in comparison with how it might fortify the longevity of a community under an alternative framework. The paper will point to examples of existing practices that apply principles of degrowth in furthering sustainable build- ing and living practices in the context of their community. Using the framework of degrowth, this paper expands the notion of sustainable design to include the social dimension (ie, whether a project sustains a community or displaces it); provides an analysis of “green growth” and “green-washing,” and equips architects with an understanding of ecology that considers the biosphere and the community where the proj- ect is sited as being inextricable from one another.

Architecture and Analogous Habitats

Harrison Atelier proposes architecture for multiple species in projects that range from pavilion-scale agricultural infrastructure to speculations for new urban ecologies. Such built work represents the application of principles from architectural theories of the posthuman, namely a focus that seeks to integrate habitats for non-humans into architectural design concerns. The Pollinators Pavilion by architect Ariane Harrison, seeks a larger role for architecture in environmental activism and focuses on biodiversity conservation and materials exploration. Harrison Atelier uses artificial intelligence and automated scientific monitoring strategies to create and analyze habitat systems and increase building awareness.

Salty Urbanism: Toward an Adaptive Coastal Design Framework to Address Rising Seas and Climate Change

Over the next 100 years, nothing will radically change thecoastal built environment more than climate change and sea level rise. The coastal zone is home to some of our country’s most valuable ecological and socio-economic assets. Many of these locations are being demonstrably transformed dueto large-scale human and biophysical processes. The result is a potential loss of myriad ecosystem services such as storm protection, wildlife habitat, recreation and aesthetics, among others. Policy and design solutions are not truly consideringthe necessary transformation that will be required to live and work within a saturated coastal environment. The old paradigm of flood management and control will need tochange from prevention to acceptance and population will decline as businesses and individuals decide the costs are too high. The need for developing a long-term urban design and planning framework that adapts to these effects is critical. More specifically, there is a need for a “systems” approach that utilizes urban design and takes into consideration infrastructure impacts, future investments, and insurability of risk as long-term objectives to address potential impacts from both coastal flooding and rising sea levels, while at the same time guiding communities’ future land use and investment plans.

Pulp: Research in Temporary, Biodegradable Structures

This paper documents in-progress design research in temporary, biodegradable structures. The experimental, thin-shell monocoque structures have been cast using a variety of cellulose-based materials, and represent a sampling of the outcome of a studio taught at three different architecture schools to date.

Ecologies of Consumption: Food, Materials & Climate

Our ways of living are endangered and on the verge of catastrophic change. Though we may experience the effects of climate change at a macro level, changes are rhizomatic, cascading through scales and networks interconnected by materials and energies, biologies and chemistries, economies and cultures; each of these connections affecting the very ingredients of our everyday life in diverse and unpredictable ways. No other system of matter and exchange offers such a thorough lens through which to examine these effects as does our contemporary food systems. This lecture presents a perspective on how degrees of interconnectivity and the precarity of decision-making for food, materials and construction can impact the future of built environments.

Cultural & Climatic Actors: Shifting Roles of Architects and Practice

As the skills required for creating architecture continue to broaden and deepen, integrating professional experience into architectural education will be increasingly necessary. This integration will create graduates that are more adaptable and versatile than through academic experience alone. Professional Practice discourse is an obvious venue for discussing and exploring the broader skills required for success and advancement in architectural practice, however, this paper entry discusses a shift of conventional practice to a practice that addresses community work – from production processes – through a semester-long studio experience. The studio was dedicated to the students’ professional development of social and environmental responsibility using a transdisciplinary and collaborative approach. The impacts of intersecting architectural practice and interdisciplinary collaborators with architectural education through community engagement dissolves the notion that these actors are mutually exclusive. Rather, what yielded is an inclusive approach to creating environments that are more socially conscious; benefitting both the students and community patrons.