In this project, each guest room is constructed with an expanded wall: typical functional layers (thermal protection, water pro- tection, sun protection) expand as spatially habitable microclimates. The basic elements of an expanded wall act separately, but in concert with each other to make a multispecies condenser for a particular climate.
A note about the structure of the project – these designs were conceived in section as infrastructural cyborgs with an emphasis on systems thinking and performance. 3 These designs exist somewhere between typology and singular design project, as conceptual slivers intentionally without the context of a larger building plan or program. The site is not a parcel but instead a specific ecological community to which the project is attuned. Grassland, aquatic and urban systems interweave, support and interact to provide refuge over at least a 75-year time frame. This project develops an architecture of adaptive cohabitation where, in recognition of our mutually intertwined existence, design improves conditions for nonhumans as well as humans. Within architecture is the potential to restructure the relationship between humans and other species.
An expanded wall is the productive tool for thinking about space as a series of different microclimates that form the multispecies condenser. Climate shelters extend the range of species that each condenser supports. What follows here are details of the expanded wall system of a multi-species condenser, a building system that provides refuge and regeneration for vulnerable species of the Chihauhuan Desert.
Grassland, aquatic and urban systems interweave, support and interact to provide refuge over at least a 75-year time frame.
1 Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, The Sixth Extinction: Patterns of life and the future of humankind , 1995 and Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An unnatural history, 2014, explore the Sixth Extinction, (alternately the Anthropocene Extinction or Holocene Extinction) as the most recent and ongoing mass extinction in the series: Big Five mass extinctionsn – periods in geologic history where there was a significant loss in biodiversity. 2 The Nonhuman Turn , 2015, came out of a 2012 conference, 'The Nonhuman Turn in 21st Century Studies'. Richard Grusin writes in the introduction, “… to name, characterize, and therefore to consolidate a wide variety of recent and current critical, theoretical, and philosophical approaches to the humanities and social sciences … engaged in decentering the human in favor of a turn toward and concern for the nonhuman …” 3 Landscape theorist Elizabeth Meyer, in 'The Expanded Field of Landscape Architecture' 1997, proposes the landscape cyborg as a hybrid of human and nonhuman natural processes (p53) within the context of questioning problematic binary pairings such as man and nature.
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on site review 41 :: infrastructure
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