ABSTRACT

This book presents a series of pedagogical experiments translating climate science, environmental humanities, material research, ecological practices into the architectural curriculum. 

Balancing the science and humanities, it exposes recent pedagogical experiments from renown educators, while also interrogating a designer’s agency between science and speculation in the face of climate uncertainty. The teaching experiments are presented across four sections: Abstraction, Organization, Building, and Narrative, exposing core parts of an architect’s education and how educators can simultaneously provide fundamental skills and constructive literacy while instigating environmental sensibilities. Chapters cover issues such as an unstable hydrosphere, water infrastructure, remediating materials, methods of disassembly and adaptive reuse, as well as constructing new aesthetic categories of climate change, and implementing oral histories of construction, among many others.

Written and edited by expert design educators actively engaged in experimenting in new forms of pedagogy, this book will be of great use to architecture instructors at all levels looking to renew their teaching practices to more directly address the climate emergency. It will also appeal to those academics across the built environment interested in the ways design can affect and adapt to climate change.

section I|5 pages

Abstraction

chapter 1|12 pages

The Deep Time Project

Architecture as a Planetary Abstraction

chapter 2|13 pages

What is the Color of the Wildfire Orange Sky?

An Outline for an Aesthetic Sensibility under Climate Change

chapter 3|11 pages

The Data of Disasters

chapter 4|12 pages

Access to Tools

A Question of Matter and Energy

section II|7 pages

Organization

chapter 5|16 pages

Unstable Waters

Teaching in the Fluid Context

chapter 6|17 pages

Solar Sculpting

Housing Morphology and Collective Energy

chapter 7|15 pages

Life Support

The Greenhouse as an Architecture of Survival

chapter 8|17 pages

The Water Dilemma

Descaling Clean Water Infrastructure

section III|4 pages

Building

chapter 9|11 pages

Natural Building Materials in Architecture Pedagogy

Challenging Conventions Hands-On

chapter 10|11 pages

Thermally Active Concrete

Researching Remediating Materials

chapter 11|17 pages

Air

A Field of Intense Materiality

chapter 12|13 pages

Deep Ecology by Design

From Mining Modernism to Radical Reuse

section IV|7 pages

Narrative

chapter 13|12 pages

Moving Narratives

Design Pedagogies and Nomadic Pastoralist Traditions

chapter 14|13 pages

Built Environment as Palimpsest

Disassembly, Reassembly, Recycling, towards Experimental Preservation

chapter 16|9 pages

Doubt, Rapture, Power, and Knowledge

A Four-Part Reflection on Architectural Education

part |10 pages

CODA

chapter |8 pages

Elephant in the Room

DESIGN EARTH