Last Wednesday, Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner revealed plans for a multi-billion-dollar initiative designed to prepare the city against future climate change-related disasters. The 186-page document, Resilient Houston, elaborates on methods the coastal city can adopt to become better prepared for future storms, sea-level rise, and the urban heat island effect. “Houston, as the energy capital of the world, must lead the global energy transition,” Turner writes in the document’s introduction. “If we do not, we will jeopardize our regional economy and prosperity for generations of Houstonians.” To address the 667-square-mile city as a whole, Resilient Houston is divided into five scales: people, neighborhoods, bayous, the city, and the region. Each scale is met with a number of corresponding goals that includes “expanding access to wealth-building and employment opportunities,” “building up, not out, to promote smart growth as Houston’s population increases,” and “transforming city government to operationalize resilience and build trust.” The plan also proposes the planting of 4.6 million trees throughout the city, the removal or replacement of homes in particularly flood-prone areas, and achieving carbon neutrality by 2050. Preparation for Resilient Houston began shortly after Hurricane Harvey ravaged the city in August 2017. “One year after Harvey,” Turner explained, “we were not only focused on our recovery, but on the transformative change that comes from thinking and acting holistically to build and grow our long-term resilience.” The city received a direct allocation of $61 million following the development of a climate change resiliency proposal in November 2017 that called for enhanced infrastructure measures and the buying out homes in especially vulnerable areas of the Houston-Galveston region. According to the Houston Chronicle, the plan was pushed forward in the last year thanks to the recent appointment of Marissa Aho as the City’s Chief Resilience Officer last February. Aho previously helped craft a resiliency plan for Los Angeles, a city with a population density and reliance on automobiles similar to that of Houston. With a $1.8 million grant from Shell Oil, Resilient Houston allowed the city to gain membership in the 100 Resilient Cities, a program developed by The Rockefeller Foundation that provided funding, capacity building, and technical assistance for climate change resiliency around the world before concluding in July 2019.

Agnes Denes’s watershed retrospective at The Shed, the sliding art hall at New York’s Hudson Yards, Absolutes and Intermediates (open through March 22), feels at times audaciously oracular. With its global environmental themes, conceptual graphs of the totality of human knowledge, and exaggerated post-human scale drawings, the exhibition speaks to a millenarianism powerfully present today among anyone paying attention. Yet, much of it she conceived a half-century ago. At times, it makes Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion domes and the previous heroic gestures of land art look like frivolous child’s play. “I asked her once how she knew in the early ’60s what we know now about this place, where in the early ’60s you didn’t have phrases like climate change,” said curator Emma Enderby, who organized the show. “She just said that it was there. Scientists were talking about it. You just had to have your ears open and your tentacles out. You had to be reading the texts and reading between the lines.” Before joining The Shed as a curator, Enderby worked at Public Art Fund, where she became familiar with Denes through her landmark Wheatfield—A Confrontation (1982), which the organization sponsored. Back in 1982, Denes planted two acres on landfill dug up from the World Trade Center while the site sat empty waiting to be developed into Battery Park City, arguably her most famous work. Enderby suggested a retrospective, along with the idea of commissioning unrealized pieces, in line with The Shed’s mission to support original cross-disciplinary work. The work is well organized and emphasized thanks to the work of the New York-based New Affiliates, who designed the exhibition. Photographs of Wheatfield staged by a TIME Magazine photographer show Denes standing Moses-like with a staff in the field of golden wheat, the gray towers of Wall Street on the horizon, contrasting the subduing, objectified, and commodification of the built environment with an image of resurgent nature. The figure of a woman projected as a life-giving force alongside one of the earliest human technologies, agriculture, hinted at a possible regeneration of incessant urban verticality and sprawl. “It was insane. It was impossible,” Denes wrote. “But it would draw people’s attention to having to rethink their priorities and realize that unless human values were reassessed, the quality of life, even life itself, was in danger.” The exhibition sprawls through two floors of The Shed’s double-height galleries, taking its title from a radically-scaled parametric chart Denes plotted on a sheet of AT&T Bell Labs graph paper in 1970. Absolutes and Intermediates visualizes nothing less than the history and future of the universe, from its formation to its disappearance into nothing, sweeping through the emergence of human life, the development of abstract reasoning, the creation of superintelligent machines and artificial life forms, and the evolution of a future species of homo sapiens. Expansive, minutely detailed drawings of Denes’s grand alternative systems and condensations of knowledge are displayed in long vitrines—some of them longer than 20 feet—beside study models and video interviews that show Denes as much a thinker as a visual artist. Another uncanny early piece from 1970, Matrix of Knowledge, predicts information overload in ways that are halfway too optimistic, halfway right on the mark. Charted using dialectic triangulation, in which Denes represents interconnected fields of knowledge as intersections of that construct larger geometric structures, she wrote that the sum of accumulated information doubles every ten years, more than the mind can handle. In the future systems will have to be set up to preselect and reduce incoming data, leading to loss of freedom. “Mass media is already making choices for us,” she wrote at the time, “a[nd] specialization is also leading in that direction by trapping valuable data within each specialty where it remains undigested, hindering accurate deductions and combination as the flow of communication is blocked.” A maximalist ecological intervention conceived in 1982, Tree Mountain-A Living Time Capsule—11,000 Trees, 11,000 People, 400 Years is breathtaking in its ambition and gets a dedicated display room at The Shed. Commissioned on the occasion of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and realized by 1996, 11,000 trees were planted in a gravel pit in Ylöjärvi, Finland, that was being reclaimed from environmental destruction. Each tree was assigned a dedicated custodian, along with a certificate naming its owner. Planted in a swirling pyramidal pattern, Tree Mountain would take on its full meaning over the course of centuries, Denes wrote, changing from a shrine to a decadent era to a monument of a great civilization to benefit future generations. The entire second floor is devoted to a large number of Denes’s conceptual pyramidal drawings, along with three special commissions created for the show. The pyramids are largely thought experiments expressed as drawings on a crazy scale, such as her iteration of Pascal’s Triangle, no. 3 (1974), which extends halfway across the gargantuan Shed gallery, displayed in a glass case, all drawn by hand in painstaking detail. Others use dots, thin lines, and stick figures to sketch out eccentric forms—probability, a flying fish, silk, reflection, a flexible space station—creating pyramids in which slight individual variations result in reverberating distortions in the whole. The gallery commissioned a version of the probability pyramid, Model for Probability Pyramid—Study for Crystal Pyramid (2019) and built it from nearly 6,000 3D-printed corn-based bricks, taking advantage of the venue’s unusual ceiling height and technical capacity. Illuminated from the inside, the crystalline structure stretches to 30-feet-by-22.5-feet at its base and reaches 17 feet in height. As originally conceived, the pyramid would be constructed of 100,000 glass blocks, rivaling the ancient pyramids and carrying mathematical information into the future. Another special commission was a translucent, teardrop-shaped object, also lit from inside, and hovering mid-air. A custom electromagnetic circuit in the base and a magnet within the sculpture suspends the teardrop as if by magic. It’s a model for a monumental architectural structure, a floating city conceived in 1984 as a part of a series of organic forms. The structures reference back to 4000 B.C Egyptian pyramids and were created for a future in which their inhabitants live in space or self-contained floating environments. They’re intended as mandalas that define benevolent destinies: The structures “break loose from the tyranny of being built,” Denes wrote, becoming “flexible to take on dynamic forms of their own choosing. At this point they decide to fend for themselves and create their own destiny.” The other special project, Model for a Forest for New York (2014— ), is a much more recent one: A plan to plant 100,000 trees in a form that looks like a flower from the sky on a 120-acre landfill in Edgemere, Queens, with support from the Rockaway Waterfront Alliance. The forest’s conception is also more straightforwardly contemporary, appealing to public health concerns, as it would address asthma problems in the adjacent neighborhood, remove carbon dioxide from the air, and help clean the groundwater. That makes the project somewhat more prosaic, and in a way disappointing—in the same manner as a waterfront berm with a park on top, which suggests the greater truth of her aesthetic project. Well-known ecological artists like Peter Fend have complained for ages that artists are not taken seriously when proposing environmental interventions because they are not trained engineers, and the resultant projects are often wildly out of scale and untested. But with the world as we now know it is coming to an end, be it the current political order or via the climate crisis, Denes’s visionary planetary-scale retorts have a fitting rejoinder: Absolutes and Intermediates suggests the potential of aesthetic imagination—not just quantitative trading and tech engineers—to regenerate it anew.

The Greenport Passive House is an energy-efficient project in the harbor town of Greenport, New York, on the North Fork of Long Island. Architect Wayne Turett designed the residence as his own home. Drawing inspiration from the local barn vernacular, the carbon-neutral project was made to show how designers can address the climate crisis without sacrificing contemporary expectations of comfort and style.

Turett considered three key elements in the design of the Passive House: “First, the building envelope, which had to be completely sealed so that there was no leakage of air; then the insulation, to ensure that heat would not escape or cold air enter; and finally, the added elements like roof overhangs that protect the house from receiving too much sunlight in the summer,” he said. As a result of these decisions, the Greenport Passive House consumes nearly 90 percent less heating energy than existing homes and 75 percent less energy than average new construction. The home also benefits from triple-glazed windows and energy-recovery ventilation, which brings in and takes out air.

The home’s exterior is shiplap gray cedar and cement with an aluminum roof. The insulation works in combination with a proprietary sheathing taped to form the air barrier, allowing for an airtight building envelope. The all-electric home is heated and cooled with a duct mini-split system aided by an ERV. Inside, a neutral color scheme and light wood materials along with white walls and upholstery create a bright, airy aesthetic. A combined kitchen, dining, living room, and porch were intentionally programmed on the second level with views to the water. Below, bedrooms and bathrooms are accessed via an outdoor shower to smooth the transition from the site’s sandy shores. As an integrated project, the home fuses Turett’s modern aesthetic with a performative building envelope.

Architect: Turett Collaborative Location: Greenport, New York Contractor: The Turett Collaborative Plumbing: Duravit, Hansgrohe Axor Exterior siding: Fabricated by Vector East Flooring: Heart Pine with Woca White Pigment Oil Hardware: Kenwa, Ranpo, Kwikset HVAC: Mitsubishi Roofing: Atas Aluminum Standing Seam Windows: Bildau & Bussmann by Eco Supply

J. Meejin Yoon is a cofounding principal of Höweler + Yoon Architecture and, since January 2019, the Gale and Ira Drukier Dean of Architecture, Art, and Planning at Cornell University. Previously, she was the head of the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she was also a professor for 17 years.

Höweler + Yoon Architecture has won numerous awards, including the Progressive Architecture Award, the Audi Urban Future Award, and the Emerging Voices award from the Architectural League of New York. The firm has built around the world; projects currently under construction include the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia and a 20,000-square-foot corporate clubhouse in Chengdu, China.

Jack Balderrama Morley, AN’s managing editor, spoke with Yoon about the state of architecture in 2019, and where the profession can—and should—go from here.

The Architect’s Newspaper: What do you think are the biggest problems in the building industry and the architecture profession in the U.S. right now? Meejin Yoon: I think many would say that the biggest design challenge of our time is climate change. But expanding that further, I would say that the critical question everyone in the field is asking is, what is the agency of architecture? Do architects have the kind of agency and ability to impact these big challenges? Agency requires broad disciplinary knowledge so that the architect can lead and coordinate across disciplines in joined efforts to address the big environmental challenges of our time, issues around rapid urbanization, and those issues’ potential impact on social equity. As a practicing architect, you come up against limits that you do not come up against within academia but these are productive in helping us frame and reframe broad questions related to agency. There are great examples of architects who, because of their social mission, are expanding beyond the traditional limits of professional practice, whether it is through developing internal research entities or turning their practices into non-profits, or partnering with NGOs and cities to address urban resiliency and adaptation questions. Thinking about agency, one of the major social issues that has come up in architecture in recent years is the relationship between architects and the people who actually build the buildings. Do architects have a responsibility to address these labor issues? I was thinking back on the most basic tenets of the profession of architecture. When we get our licenses, it's very clear that the mandate of architecture is, at the most basic level, about health, safety, and welfare. Your question reminds me that part of health, safety, and welfare is thinking through labor in a way that extends to every aspect of the building, including the means by which it is built. Of course, architects do not always get to make labor decisions, but clients do, and architects have an ability to impact labor by advocating for how important sound, ethical labor practices are. We can speak to the benefits of working with craftspeople who are adequately trained and fairly compensated for their work. Architects everywhere ought to be consistent in applying our mandate to decisions we make and influence from design through construction, and for the entire life of the building, so that we can work together toward a public good. Throughout much of the 2010s, it looked like architecture and the tech industry were moving toward some kind of marriage: Bjarke Ingels and Michel Rojkind were recruited by WeWork, and Ingels and Thomas Heatherwick started working for Alphabet, Google’s parent company. This year, though, the Sidewalk Labs development in Toronto has come under intense criticism—its glossy architecture has been accused of “design-washing”—and WeWork looks to be on the verge of bankruptcy. More generally, skepticism has grown about companies like Tesla, Amazon, and Facebook. How do you see architecture relating to big tech from now on? Historically, some of the most catalytic projects have been when design professionals work with industry. I’m thinking of IBM and the Eameses—when Charles and Ray Eames created the Mathematica exhibitions and the IBM Pavilion, they participated as designers in a disruptive moment. In recent times—when Google and WeWork hire the Bjarkes and the Heatherwicks—it’s really exciting that these big tech industries are valuing design because they elevate design to the world at a scale that smaller companies cannot. I don't think designers should walk away from opportunities to help any entity with building questions, but rather exercise our agency and use our expertise. When these larger companies partner with architects and designers, I am hopeful because I think it's not about design-washing at that point, it's really about design transformation. When a big tech company rethinks workplace design, what a corporation could be or should be, or where headquarters are sited and located, and looks into the environmental footprint of some of these options, we want architects at the table. On that note, the climate crisis is breaking into architecture discourse in a new way this year with professionals getting involved in a potential Green New Deal and the Extinction Rebellion. Do you see the profession talking about buildings’ effect on climate (and not just their response to it) in a way that goes beyond what has come before? I think that climate change is the greatest design challenge of our time, and it's a design problem that cuts across disciplines and scales, ranging from policy design to urban and ecological design, to transportation and building design, to land-use practices and individual consumption patterns. I think this means we need to work in new ways. There are many parts of the profession that are built on productive, adversarial relationships, but I think productive tensions aren't going to work at the scale of climate change design. It's much more about strategic alliances that range from the speculative to the applied, to these large scale initiatives. The scale of the problem is one that can't be resolved solely incrementally with different tactics by different industries and professions. It needs large-scale, coordinated efforts. Earlier this year, you wrote in Architect magazine: “We need to keep current and future generations of women from needing to take on both the rigorous work our field demands and the workarounds that allow them to do it. No one today should need to hide in a gutter in order to pursue, endure, and flourish in an industry that needs them more than ever.” What specific changes that you think schools or firms can make in the near future? There is a perception of a kind of exclusiveness of the profession of architecture, and I think that breeds more exclusivity. The combination of the high cost of tuition and the low starting salary might deter many people, in particular those who are traditionally underrepresented, from pursuing both a degree and the profession. The discipline cannot afford to continue to exclude that much talent. At Cornell, we have the Cornell Future Architect Award, and it's an amazing program started by previous students, working with friends in New York City. The program supports the pipeline of underrepresented minorities into the field by providing scholarships for our introductory summer program that exposes upper-level high school students to architecture. We give eight to 12 scholarships for summer programs, and we see that having an impact on the number of students that are then exposed to the profession, are equipped to put a portfolio together, and can then apply not only to our program, but to architecture programs throughout the United States. That's the pipeline side. I would say one thing we could do as a profession is support and encourage leadership among women and minorities who go to work at firms. Increasing the diversity of people in decision-making positions at all levels of architecture practices, the building industry, construction industry, development, real estate is going to have only positive effects on the profession overall. Switching gears a bit, this year, some of the giants of postmodernism (Stanley Tigerman, Charles Jencks, Robert Venturi) passed away as the movement’s bright colors, bold forms, and cheeky style are being embraced by the Instagram generation. What role do you see for postmodernism in the near future? What was essential about postmodernism was that it offered a critique of the status quo and offered concrete alternatives. What’s happening now is coming out of an extreme pluralism which values everything at the same level. And so, there’s no longer a kind of disciplinary discourse like before with the grays versus the whites. There was a productive value in that point-counterpoint debate. I heard someone recently say, “Oh, the discipline has no problems—we’re in the era of the ‘post-problematic,’ where everything is possible and nothing is wrong.” I was surprised to hear that because I think our discipline has more challenges than ever: climate change, urbanization, equity. But I think what this individual was referring to is within the disciplinary framework, the kind of internal debates and challenges are no longer there or have become so plural and horizontal that the stylistic representation proliferates in lieu of discourse. I say this knowing that some of the younger generation will challenge this idea and say that our representational world is itself discursive. But I’m not so sure it’s discursive in addressing the near future challenges we will all face together. What did you think of last year’s Chicago Biennial? There was some criticism that it didn't show enough buildings and focused too much on research. I think we need a whole ecosystem of design, and immediate and long-term applied design research, and biennials or exhibitions are a good place to showcase that work on a focused topic. The value of applied research is when it has a long-term impact on shaping, let’s say, the building industry or influencing the profession. Also, some research is more immediate; it’s already influencing the profession. And for other people, you’re looking at their research and saying, "This is a really radically different way of thinking of how to build," whether it deals with biology or computation, etc. And maybe we’ll see the impact and the influence of their work in a decade or two, but it's still important and valid. Of course, if the research doesn’t have any impact or influence on the profession, then I think that’s problematic.

The Global Center on Adaptation (GCA) will soon have a new home in Rotterdam that reflects its dedication to managing climate change. Powerhouse Company, also based in Rotterdam, has revealed its design for Floating Office Rotterdam (FOR), a fully self-sufficient and energy-neutral timber structure that will float on the port of Rijnhaven. Powerhouse Company has integrated several advanced sustainability measures in the design of FOR. The waters of the Rijnhaven will provide an ample source for heat exchange below, and an open gable roof will be split between solar panels and greenery. Overhanging floors throughout the building will shade lower offices from the sun while still allowing for large windows and plenty of daylight. In addition to the offices, FOR will house a restaurant with a large terrace and a “floating pool” within the Maas River. The GCA was launched in the fall of 2018 by former UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. The commission is rooted in the development of measures to manage the inevitable effects of climate change through technology, planning, and investment. Ban's co-leaders of the GCA include Bill Gates and managing director of the International Monetary Fund Kristalina Georgieva. To GCA staff, the new building is a fitting representation of their work in exploring a sustainable future: “As the world’s climate changes, extreme weather events and rising sea levels present new challenges for architects. Embedding resilient features into a design before disaster strikes not only makes economic sense but it can also help us to mitigate against climate change,” said Patrick Verkooijen, CEO of the Commission, in a press statement. Construction of the FOR will begin at an offsite location in Rotterdam in spring 2020 before the finished structure is moved to the Rijnhaven.

Indonesia is building a new $34 billion capital city that will be steered by none other than Softbank CEO and WeWork financier Masayoshi Son, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and Abu Dhabi Mohammed Bin Zayed Al Nahyan.  Bloomberg reported that the three will be part of a committee to conceive of and oversee construction of a new capital in the province of East Kalimantan on Borneo Island, the third-largest island in the world at 287,000 square miles. Indonesian President Joko Widodo said in August that he aimed to move the government and as many as 7 million people there beginning in 2024 to a new city spanning 632,500 acres—four times the size of Jakarta. Construction is anticipated to begin later this year with office space and homes for 1.5 million civic workers. According to Indonesia’s Coordinating Ministry for Maritime Affairs and Investment, the oversight committee, including Son, Blair, and the Crown Prince, among others, is meant to help boost investment for the new project and encourage other entities to give. President Widodo wants private and state-owned groups to fund 80 percent of the build, noted Bloomberg. Softbank has already committed $40 billion while companies across Abu Dhabi have given up to $22.8 billion. The rush to ditch Jakarta comes after years of overcrowding; the interior city holds 10 million people while the total metropolitan area boasts nearly 30 million people. Costly effects due to climate change have also wreaked havoc on the capital city, forcing the country to rethink its plans. It’s no secret that the city, located on the northwest coast of Java, the world’s most populated island, is sinking into the sea at a rate of 6.7 inches per year.  Flooding has become a regular issue as well. In early January, Jakarta experienced the most intense period of rainfall in the city's history. Flash flooding forced tens of thousands of locals to evacuate, displacing most, and left 66 people dead. Residents are now taking steps to sue the city's governor. Set at a higher elevation just north of Java, Borneo Island doesn’t see these types of natural disasters as commonly. East Kalimantan, for example, is a more heavily forested area and suffers from heavy rain or dry seasons as well as monsoon winds. 

Indonesia: Jakarta residents file first ever class action suit against government after biblical floods: -> dumped 337 millimetres of rain in one day, most since records began in 1886 -> submerged 182 neighbourhoods -> killed 63 -> created 185,000 refugees

And it could get worse pic.twitter.com/V7xsGIVWLq — Assaad Razzouk (@AssaadRazzouk) January 13, 2020

Government officials argue that the move isn’t just about Jakarta’s physical state, but about its economic situation as well. Congestion alone costs Indonesia an estimated $6.5 billion per year, according to Al Jazeera, which has further stymied the nation's growth.

Plants sprout from coolers and plastic pots. There is reflective silver mylar everywhere, and animal skins. On the kitchen, shelf cookbooks offer instructions on foraging and recipes call for cockroaches. This is the Singaporean apartment of the future as imagined by the U.K. design studio Superflux. Mitigation of Shock, which is currently on display in the exhibition 2219: Futures Imagined at Singapore’s ArtScience Museum shows possible climate futures at a human scale. By using the domestic interior, Superflux defamiliarizes the every day to show us just how foreign—or not—our new normal might be. “We use narrative and speculation as a means of exploring complex problems that are often discussed in terms of data and abstract projections,” Superflux partners Jon Ardern and Anab Jain explained over email. The apartment takes the shape of a Singaporean HDB—or public housing—flat. “In the installation, visitors experience the themes we were thinking about through tangible evidence, artifacts, tools, growing systems, window views, and so on.” There is a circular farming system, an upgrade from the “fogponics” system in previous versions of the project in London and Barcelona. While those apartments had been outfitted with hacked IKEA furniture—a sort of post-crisis version of reclaimed heritage wood—in this version. Read the full article on our interiors and design website, aninteriormag.com.

A few months back, while casually scrolling through some feed or another, I was struck by a series of images for a Portland-based boot company, Danner. Kicking up a faint cloud of dust with measured, deliberate steps, a lone photovoltaic maintenance worker moves across the image between parallel sets of solar trackers in a 64-acre facility in the high desert landscape just outside of Bend, Oregon. Emblazoned in bold over the image, the word “STRONGHOLD” conjured the work-boot family and the attitude of the region from which it springs. In what could pass for a Green New Deal campaign lifted from only the most heroic of WPA posters, other images from the commercial shoot evoke the photovoltaic maintenance process—a delicate operation involving technical expertise, careful stewardship, the right boots “built for comfort and stability,” and a Dodge Ram with plates reading “1932,” Danner’s date of establishment prior to relocating to Portland, where it would supply loggers with caulked boots during the Depression. From those origins spring the current slate of boot categories: work, hike, lifestyle, hunt, military, and law enforcement, producing an uneasy space where aesthetic cohesion and mythologizing coagulate in an open wound of mixed messaging between bright green and militarized versions of the future. The Danner website declares: “The Future Is Strong.”

Scenes like the above are a renewable resource in the Pacific Northwest, underwritten by a low-key utopian sense that’s as much about a “way” of doing things as it is about place. Oregon is of the American West, but not exactly the center of its mythos. In the estimation of the 1940 Federal Writers’ Project guide to the state, Oregon’s position at the “end of the trail” leveraged terminus into an exceptional charge that “inspire[d] not provincial patriotism, but affection”: “The newcomer at first may smile at the attitude of Oregonians towards their scenery and their climate. But soon he will begin to refer to Mt. Hood as ‘our mountain.’” Here, the “dismal skies” and rains of winter were merely the “annual tax” one paid for the privilege of inhabiting a state of “eternal verdure”—a cozy picture that excludes the desert land east of the Cascades mountain range and a whole host of volcanic and seismic activity lying in wait and prone to violent outbursts.

For its part, the city of Bend has recently been deemed a commuter town for Silicon Valley and is an increasingly expensive playground where brewpubs, rec centers, inner tube flotillas on the Deschutes River, and extensive parkland make their own kind of lively stronghold at the base of the Three Sisters Mountains. As in Portland just on the other side of the Cascades, there’s a rolling collision between earlier imported and newly imported visions of an affluent good life in nature that are just complementary enough to exist in tenuous détente while other narratives vie for recognition.

Upon arriving in Portland by way of a westward drive through the Columbia River Gorge, it was hard for me to escape the impression that this working landscape had been staged as an advertisement for the achievement of a kind of augmented reality just removed from the usual roiling of time. The B Reactor at Hanford, Washington, and the still-toxic ghosts of the Manhattan Project were out there somewhere, as was a Lamb Weston facility that processes 600 million pounds of frozen potato products annually, but here in this gash through the Cascades was a vision of forward movement in balance. Flanked by wind turbines running along the hill crests and with Hood’s emblematic peak directly ahead, rail and moss-lined roadways delivered a parade of works and features, from dams, locks, and spillways to waterfalls and elevated viewpoints. Some of these projects, like the Bonneville Dam, have been held up as pivotal but imperfect New Deal–era models of public hydropower administration, while The Dalles Dam is known more for its erasure of Celilo Falls, once a critical center of indigenous cultural and economic life. Such erasure and fragmentation, however, are far from the exception, as white nationalists have also long found refuge in Cascadia’s crevices and realty boards since the state’s founding in black exclusion. Here, too, the American Redoubt and various Cascadian secession movements pick up where Ernest Callenbach’s more countercultural 1975 novel Ecotopia left off with utopian search/seeking, be it for an ecotopia or a white nationalist stronghold.

As a perverse addendum to the theme of exclusion, however, Oregon’s urban growth boundaries have made for a compelling regional planning model, containing sprawl to preserve the "natural" playground and its biodiversity. In all things a kind of balance. Runaway utopian-as-utilitarian dreaming was, after all, the villain of California-born author Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1971 novel, The Lathe of Heaven, a fable of Portland’s exceptionalist attitude and the relative wealth of its natural inheritance. In this corner of the country, there was the possibility, for some, of a more comfortable—or less uncomfortable—future. Still, the novel’s status as a critique of progress or a privileged and resigned version of the same remains difficult to discern.

Storied weirdness aside, Portland is one of several metropolitan centers with the self-designation, “the city that works.” And it does, though critiques of the “sustainable city” are rolling in from those willing to cast a more critical eye toward the externalities and displacements produced through progress of this sort. Persistent NIMBY-ism and the ongoing battle over a proposed I-5 expansion amid new reports that Portland’s carbon emissions reduction progress has flatlined since 2012 suggest that the city’s climate policies are still far from where they need to be. On a more positive note, Oregon HB 2001’s move to effectively dissolve single-family zoning was the kind of course correction one would come to expect in the wake of new evidence of housing need. As with other improvements over its history—UGBs, public ownership of the coast, mass timber innovation by firms like LEVER and Hacker, ecodistricts, hydropower, cycling culture, and transit-oriented development—in paving the way for a proliferation of duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes, Oregon again models a quietly progressive version of a future.

Exemplary care-oriented building projects also come to mind, like the Seven Corners Collaborative in Southeast Portland, where Waterleaf designed a new, fully accessible colocation center for local nonprofits that provide support services for people with disabilities, along with an assistive technology lab for training, consultation, and public interface. Elsewhere, in the Lents neighborhood, a shelter in the repurposed shell of an old church forms the heart of a new “family village” campus by Jessica Helgerson Interior Design, Carleton Hart Architecture, and Corlett Landscape Architecture that’s furthering the use of trauma-informed design and concentrated service delivery for families experiencing homelessness. Also in Lents, the new Asian Health & Service Center by Holst provides a venue not only for much-needed affordable healthcare services for the area, but also a well-appointed infrastructure for community social events, all granted a generous view of Mt. Hood from the top floor. SCOTT | EDWARDS ARCHITECTURE’s Portland Mercado fulfills a similar social function for Portland’s Latinx community through a modest adaptive reuse and landscape strategy that ties an existing structure together with a series of food carts, covered outdoor space, and copious seating. Led in part by the efforts of the latter two firms along with Ankrom Moisan and organizations such as Home Forward and Central City Concern, recent supportive housing projects in the city, such as Bud Clark Commons, the Beech Street Apartments, Garlington Place, and the Blackburn Center, are also demonstrating how architecture can operate and innovate through a lens of care and playfulness rather than singular virtuosity or brute force.

This ethos also comes out in Portland’s new and renovated green spaces, such as the collaboration by 2.ink Studio and Skylab on Luuwit View Park in East Portland. The park stands as a microcosm of the city’s celebrated urban landscape innovations, complete with community gardens, dog park, skate park, event shelter, public art, stormwater treatment area, and bilingual signage to acknowledge and accommodate the diversity of new residents in the neighborhood, as well as trails aligned with distant landmarks like Mt. St. Helens, or “Luuwit,” as named in the Cowlitz language. Likewise, with Cully Park in Northeast Portland, 2.ink explored similar design elements on the site of a former landfill in an underserved neighborhood, including significant habitat restoration, a fitness course, and the city’s first Native gathering garden. Developed by the community nonprofit Verde in partnership with the city, the project engaged neighborhood residents throughout the process with outreach, employment, and education programs. 

More broadly, a host of design and planning-based initiatives work to translate reparative sociopolitical agendas into spatial terms, such as the Portland African American Leadership Forum’s 2017 People’s Plan and the more recent Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability publication on the Historical Context of Racist Planning in the city. Blocking pipeline projects and filling streets in the name of climate action, Sunrise, XR, and 350PDX also stake active claims on the city and its future, while newly constructed works like FLOAT’s Portals in Southern Oregon stage direct action pipeline resistance, countering fossil fuel extraction logics with an expansive meditation on architecture’s capacity to support multispecies reciprocity. Further, initiatives and organizations throughout the region like Columbia Riverkeeper, Sightline, Wisdom of the Elders, the High Desert Partnership, and the Ashland Forest Resiliency Stewardship Project engage in environmental care and land management through advocacy and cross-scalar collaborations, while efforts by the Friends of Trees and the city’s Green Street Steward Program involve volunteers in urban greening and bioswale maintenance. On the academic front, Portland State University’s Center for Public Interest Design was founded in 2013 to respond to the needs of underserved communities in the city and abroad and has since paired design-build work with robust community engagement processes, while the University of Oregon has launched a multidisciplinary fellowship initiative in Design for Spatial Justice, which mobilizes theory and practice in foregrounding narratives, experiences, and modes of design, political action, and biodiversity conservation long marginalized or excluded by fields responsible for the built environment.

How this expanding constellation of projects and practices might fare in an escalating climate struggle is a crucial question. With even cursory estimates of climate-induced in-migration to the region due to sea level rise alone projecting numbers in the hundreds of thousands over the next few decades, the challenge for utopia would initially seem to be one of scale. The war footing rhetoric of the GND, like that of the New Deal before it, anticipates such scales of action in the work of justice and infrastructural investment. A war footing for scaling care, however, is perhaps a more fraught and paradoxical charge, particularly as the goal would be to move beyond a narrow definition of relief as an improvised response toward the construction of more durable and equitable systems merging care with justice.

In a dysfunctional climate regime, what does it mean to position oneself as a stronghold or a refuge, or a model city? When PG&E issued its now-infamous directive to its California customers to “use your own resources to relocate” when the utility company unilaterally shut off power to nearly a million people back in October, it signaled that climate change survival would become a matter of self-reliance if left in the hands of those with no obligation for care. Against this backdrop, even a modicum of external accountability would come to appear as care and competency. As Holly Jean Buck writes, “There are plenty of scenarios where we deal with climate change in a middling way that preserves the existing unequal arrangements…[where] even muddling through looks like an amazing social feat, an orchestration so elaborate and requiring so much luck that people may find it a fantastic utopian dream.” In a global theater of sociopolitical and ecological degradation, it becomes difficult to assess the utopian potential of projects that work well within familiar registers, leading in some cases to a privileging of expediency and the reenactment of functioning models. 

But, even with the relative risk aversion, what bridges the perceived cultural gulf between the measured and occasionally errant strands of progressivism in the Pacific Northwest and the most fanciful Silicon Valley fever dreams is the recurring belief in some level of remove as a precondition for positive transformation and mastery. The right person in the right boots in the right geography, and a comfortable future is assured. The inclusion of photovoltaics in that picture is a welcome addition, but what is the future of an image like this in a present where what’s demanded is both a dissolution of the concept of human mastery over the environment and a dramatic mobilization, reorientation, and upscaling of progressive instruments closely aligned with the tools, attitudes, and systems that delivered the environment to the brink of collapse in the first place? Its violence veiled as much as romanticized, the story of a pioneer harnessing the productive power of a landscape was one promise of “the West.” As many of Oregon’s latest projects begin to suggest, there are and should be others, and the next steps are critical in defining the kind of refuge the region will become.

The Cold Climate Housing Research Center (CCHRC) describes itself as “an industry-based, nonprofit corporation created to facilitate the development, use, and testing of energy-efficient, durable, healthy, and cost-effective building technologies for people living in circumpolar regions around the globe.”

Aaron Cooke, the architect who leads the Sustainable Northern Communities Program at the CCHRC in Fairbanks, Alaska, is at the front lines of helping northern communities in developing solutions for homes in extremely cold climates. Cooke spoke to Matt Shaw, AN’s executive editor, and Stephen Zacks, AN contributor, about technologies and prototypes being developed to conserve energy, recycle heat, rethink building envelope systems, stabilize homes situated on melting permafrost, and ensure supplies of fresh air. As the communities of the Circumpolar North adapt to climate change, their solutions hold lessons for carbon-neutral designs in the temperate zone while providing a pointed message about post-colonial regional design.

The Architect’s Newspaper: What are the main areas of research for the CCHRC?

Aaron Cooke: Our largest program is the Building Science Research program, which deals with testing and researching the suitability of different techniques and products for the physical environment and cultural environment of circumpolar peoples. We also have a design program, the Sustainable Northern Communities program, that aims to take some of the building research and find real-world or holistic building applications. We design prototype homes that we test with occupants living in them for various periods of time. Then we have a smaller program called Policy Research, which aims to aid policymakers and governmental entities but also looks at the code amendments that northern communities need to consider. Most northern places have small populations, so they don’t have their own building code; they’ll take a building code from the temperate region and add amendments specific to the physical environment in Alaska and the Circumpolar North. Between those three programs, we try and stay at the forefront of regional design for the Arctic and subarctic climates.

Can you talk about the challenges of the extreme terrain and cold weather in the north?

The north has two primary challenges that it has to face constantly. We have an antagonistic physical environment that is very hard on buildings. Oversights in detailing or failures to plan small appropriate details in construction do not fail small in the Arctic: They always fail big, because it’s a zero-forgiveness environment. But in addition to our physical environment, the north has always faced a postcolonial problem. Every Arctic country in the world is governed by a capital city that is not in the Arctic—and that goes for Russia, Canada, Alaska, everywhere. So, there’s underrepresentation in the design field, and in policy and building code. Importing technologies, assumptions, and best practices from the temperate zone without thorough vetting causes us as many problems as our physical environment does. The idea of what a home—or a public building or a school—looks like and how it should behave is often based on temperate models, and we then have to retroactively make them Arctic. There have been famous attempts to make an architecture for the north, but there's been very little impetus to create an Arctic architecture from the north. It generally comes at us from the south, and we have to manage it somehow.

Are there things that you’re learning from traditional methods of conserving heat that go into your research, or is the group mainly developing new technologies?

It’s generally developing new technologies, but it’s also giving a platform for traditional wisdom, because people have lived here for a very, very long time and have come up with innovative ways of building in the north. You’re trying to make traditional communities aware of new technologies applicable in a harsh physical environment, and then you’re also trying to be receptive and a good listener when people are saying what has worked or hasn’t worked in the past. As an example, we did an eight-sided house for a community in the Yukon–Kuskokwim Delta of Alaska called Quinhagak. It was a very windy place: Although it only got about 24 inches of snow a year, the snow would drift in houses to the point where you couldn’t get out of the windows or in the door. We did some pretty complex wind drift studies, and we came up with this eight-sided house. We went out to the community to see if they were interested in building a prototype there to test it, and they were. We gave an analysis of winds, vector diagrams of how we thought the snow would self-scour away from the house, and I remember being in the community building and saying, “This is the shape I think that would be best for this region.” Someone stands up and said, “We used to make our houses that shape, we used to know that. It’s only in the last 50 years that we’ve started making square boxes, and [snowbanks] started drifting in.” Some things we’re discovering, and some things we’re remembering, I guess.

What are some of the new technologies you’re developing or working with? Are they materials-based or are they wall sections?

I’d say a very large bulk of our work could be divided into three fields. One is envelope design: We need warmer envelopes, and we need materials that go together in wall design differently. Arctic villages often don’t have heavy equipment, so you’re trying to find materials that can be constructed without cranes or trucks, or any of the things that we assume are going to be on job site. We also are looking at how things are transported when we choose our construction materials. When I was in architecture school, I never once had a class on sourcing materials. We assumed that the materials are going to show up at site; we’d choose them based on how they perform once they’re assembled.

In our region, about 40 percent of overall construction costs are in shipping. But we don’t take a course on how to choose materials based on how they ship, and the shipping companies are smart: The barge season is short, the air strips are short, and if something’s heavier than it is big, they charge you by weight. If something’s bigger than it’s heavy, they charge you by volume. If the barge gets delayed, you don’t build next month, you build next year. Most of our economics can be boiled down to how we get our materials to site and how we select them based on their appropriateness for shipping. In envelope design, a big part is to create a materials package that can be shipped and easily brought to a very remote location.

Besides envelope design, we work quite a bit with foundation design. The Arctic is one of the fastest changing regions in the world. There are a million models, and they all contradict each other, but one thing is for sure: We have a lot less sea ice than we used to, and that is creating unprecedented coastal erosion that is forcing our communities to relocate. Land that has been permanently frozen since the last ice age is melting in very unpredictable ways and causing massive foundation failures. It’s not hypothetically happening sometime in the future, it’s happening to us now. Those are very expensive problems, so foundation design is something that we’ve been working quite hard on. One of the easiest things to get funding for is how to design foundations for the degradation of permafrost. The third tier of what we research is mechanical systems: how to provide heat. We’re always looking for heat that is more efficient, heat that is more clean and reliable. That’ll never go away, no matter how much global warming occurs. The Arctic will always be one of the colder places on the earth, and we’ll always have a winter in which we need heat somehow.

Are there solutions that you’ve come up with, or ideal systems that you’ve developed?

A paradigm shift has happened in foundation design in the Arctic during my short career. When I was studying to be a specialist in northern design, the basic rules for permafrost foundation design were if the ground’s frozen, keep it frozen, and if it’s thawed, keep it thawed—that’s foundation design in the Arctic. In the 1960s and ’70s and ’80s, when they were putting more modern and larger buildings in the Arctic, as we were urbanizing, most of the building failures were because the building was leaking heat into the ground around the base of the foundation and melting the permafrost, creating a sinkhole. The building then had this foundation failure, and that was why most of the emphasis was on keeping the ground frozen through installation. But now the permafrost is melting even if we do everything right. Even if we perfectly thermally isolate our building from the thermal regime of the soil, it’s still melting out from under us in many circumstances, and the circumstances aren’t something that we’re able to easily predict. Since the research center is focused mostly around housing, we want adjustable foundations that the occupant can adjust without specialized knowledge—very simple mechanical foundations that can be leveled as the ground drops away or floods or heaves.

What does that look like?

It can be as complex as a kind of a Buckminster Fuller–style space frame, where you’ve got triangulated points that can be hand ratcheted, or it can be as simple as car jacks on top of columns that are pounded into the ground. We’ve tested no fewer than a dozen types of adjustable foundations. We’re mostly looking at threaded rod and things that can be jacked with a cheater bar in a circular motion or with what’s basically a glorified wrench. We haven’t given up on trying to keep the ground frozen. For larger buildings, we’re still using thermosiphons and technology that takes advantage of state change and chemicals that have a boiling point around 32 degrees Fahrenheit so that they can move heat away from the ground. We’re also looking at ground source heat pumps—or geothermal, as it’s commonly called in the Lower 48—to move heat from the ground to the house for cooling in the summer and heating in the winter.

What does fieldwork look like? Is it mostly working with communities, or testing experiments?

It’s both. Almost every year we’re building a prototype home somewhere with a local construction force. We train the local carpenters on new construction techniques. Living in an experimental house means there needs to be quite a bit of follow-up. We try to make a good, close relationship with the occupants so when there are problems with technology, they can call us, and we can get on a plane and head out there. I always require a resident of the experimental home to be on the crew, so that they fully understand the systems that are different than the rest of the houses in the village. That way, we have an above-average success rate with new technology acceptance and more pride in the construction. It’s like Habitat for Humanity for building scientists.

What are the main differences between the prototypes and traditional buildings?

The prototypes always have an envelope that we’re testing that’s different than a two-by-six wall or a structural insulated panel, which are the two most common types of walls out there already. They always have a foundation type that we’re trying to test, whenever we know that the ground is going to be volatile. We’re also looking for new mechanical systems, because rural Alaska is by and large an economically depressed region. There are large rates of poverty and overcrowding. We’re always trying to lower the heating bill and create efficient mechanical systems and healthy indoor air quality, while lowering the amount people have to pay for fuel.

Are you going out to sites and living in extreme conditions yourself?

Oftentimes when we’re building a house in the summer season, and we’re in a village that’s small enough that there’s no real lodging, we’re just sleeping on the gym floor at the school while school is out and building with the local crew. This summer, we oversaw the building of 13 homes for a community that’s relocating entirely because their original community site’s falling into the ocean now that there’s no sea ice anymore. The fall storms have been eating about 80 feet of shoreline a year, and they’re being forced to relocate the entire community. In that case, when we were building the first prototype home over there at the new community site, there was nothing there. We were just basically camping and getting our water and dealing with our own waste, and trying to stay warm through the season. Sometimes it’s a very remote field camp, and then other times it’s just hanging out at the school at night.

Is there an ideal wall section that you’ve developed at this point—or if not, what are a few examples of improvements?

One thing that almost all Arctic and northern walls need to have in common that makes construction more challenging is you absolutely need a complete thermal break in the walls. That flies in the face of every stud wall we’ve ever built. Generally, a stud wall has a structured component, and then in between the structural components is insulation. But that means, of course, that the structure is leaking heat. At the inside, the two-by-fours are in the warm; at the outside, the two-by-fours are in the cold. That might get you through the winter in the temperate zone, but it absolutely doesn’t work in the Arctic. We’re always trying to make sure that nothing that touches the inside of the thermal envelope is also touching the outside of the thermal envelope. We’ve done walls where we’ve used two-by-four studs and then had a gusset plate made of something like PVC or OSB that holds the cladding up, and then we fill it with something so that the stud doesn’t reach all the way through the thick wall. We were looking at spray-applied polyurethane for a while; you can spray past the stud and make this adobe kind of shape as a way to avoid thermal bridging of materials. The double-wall that could all go up at once added efficiencies to the framing of thick-walled structures. We’ve also looked at an older Canadian technique, recently updated, which involves reframing a two-by-four wall, sheeting the entire outside of the wall in rigid installation, and lapping the joints, not allowing any of the framing to touch the outside of the wall. This is called the REMOTE wall technique, and it would be a good fit for temperate regions with hard winters too.

What are the main challenges to energy-efficient retrofits of existing buildings?

The retrofits are a large part of our work. When you create a giant impermeable coat over your old building, the first thing that almost always happens is your indoor air quality suffers. When we do retrofits today, we’re always trying to approach indoor air environment and thermal comfort at the same time, because the understanding now is that a lot of times when you add R-value to a wall, you’re tightening the house, and you’re going to have to come up with a mechanical solution to address ventilation and fresh air.

Are heat-recovery ventilation technologies a method for bringing in fresh air and ventilating moisture without losing heat in the process?

Certainly there should be no such thing as waste heat in a place this cold, and heat recovery ventilators have been one of the technologies that have made the most progress in the last ten or 15 years.

What is a heat-recovery ventilator, exactly?

It is a method of solving the problem of fresh air being colder. You’re in a house, it’s very cold outside—say it’s 30 degrees below zero outside—and you don’t want to open your windows. You want to keep all the heat that you possibly can in your building. What that means is the carbon dioxide goes up, and anything your furniture is off-gassing becomes more concentrated. You’re not getting the air changes that you need to be a healthy human when you’re scared of the cold air coming into the house.

There’s a branch of mechanical engineering that is concerned with taking your wonderfully warm but dangerously dirty indoor air and allowing the wonderfully clean but dangerously cold outdoor air to rob the heat from it without mixing with it. That’s the question: How do we steal heat from our used air and then get it out of the house so that we can get fresh, clean air inside, but have it be warm enough that people will use that system?

The prototype in Anaktuvuk Pass looks strikingly different than other approaches. Is there a break from the past that you’re exploring, or is there a radically new wall section that you’re trying out there?

It was a wall section that we had not tried before. Anaktuvuk Pass is fly-in only. They have no roads or barge delivery. Construction costs are extremely, prohibitively expensive there. We had been working with a spray-applied polyurethane applicator to see if we could create a wall that was a two-by-four steel structure that would be built inside out. We put the interior sheeting on the stud, and then we’d spray foam out and keep spraying past the foam to create that thermal break. The look that you see there—they’re a kind of dumpling, adobe look—is all based on the thermal requirements. It’s pretty far north. The other thing is that the residents there wanted to try a building where the foundation was on the ground. We use that polyurethane foam to create a raft, and the raft basically floats on the permafrost and bridges it if any movement occurs. The spray foam comes in barrels and expands to 30 times its size when it comes out of the gun. We can fit the barrels on the plane, and we can fit a lot more R-value per cubic foot on that plane because it’s going to expand once it gets to the site.

Can you talk about any problems that you might anticipate in the crafting of policy around the Green New Deal mandates meant for temperate regions that could have a potentially harmful effect on you?

Ten or 15 years ago, there were a lot of adaptations that needed to be made for, say, a LEED system when it finally came north. The research center tries to incorporate environmentally conscious building practices into everything we do—we’re the farthest north LEED Platinum building in the world. There are certainly things that don’t apply: There was a time when permafrost was considered a wetland by professionals from the temperate zone, and in the south, you can’t build on a wetland. Here that would mean you couldn’t build on 70 percent of Alaskan soils—think about a land area bigger than the state of Texas that you’re not allowed to build anything in. Simple things like that. The other thing is the passive house ideal: Getting to 90 percent off fossil fuels in the Arctic is possible, but for the last 10 percent, the returns are just not there. Ninety percent has to be good enough, and then we have to realize that sometimes our heating is going to have to come from somewhere else.

For all the theories of architecture and design, and all the isms out there—Classicism and deconstructionism, and all the isms that exist—I believe in regionalism in architecture because I live in a place where it’s necessary. Regionalist architecture manifests itself when and where it’s most necessary. It’s no mistake that it tends to be in places like deserts and the Arctic, places where if you ignore regional inputs to design, you ignore them at your peril. Your building will fail.

In your collaboration with the Royal Danish Academy, how did their experience in extreme environments and yours overlap or inform each other?

I try to work in a pan-Arctic sense because we are all trying to solve similar, difficult design problems, but we’re doing it alone because the polar region is spread-out with a lot of different governments involved. The centers of design learning are also very far from us. There is no accredited degree in architecture north of 60 degrees latitude in North America. You’ve got to go south to get your degree, and then come north and unlearn quite a bit of what you learned in school. The Royal Danish Academy’s Architecture and Extreme Environments program recognizes this, and it does a very good job of engaging underrepresented regions in design discourse.

I can remember taking my first construction methodology course while I was getting a master’s degree in Ohio, and we were talking about foundation design, and the professor—who was a very good professor, a good architect—was teaching us about how to get our foundations below the frost line. It was my first year of school, and I asked, “What do we do when we can’t get below the frost line?” He said, “Well, don’t build there. That’s a bad site.”

So, we have this familiar problem. We want to engage universities in our design growth. We want young, smart people to care about this place and move here or return here and practice architecture here. But again: Every university that is interested in saving the Arctic is located outside the Arctic, and this is a textbook postcolonial problem, right? We get approached by universities all the time; it’s very in vogue right now to save the Arctic. The icecaps are melting, polar bears are going extinct—there are plenty of reasons that Lower-48 universities are suddenly interested in us, and we need them. We need the attention of the young designers who want to solve some of the difficult problems we have. But the question is always, are you willing to send your studio here, or are you going to try and solve the problem from South Florida?

University architecture programs, from our small rural perspective, bring a lot of resources. The unspoken worry in Alaska is that we are very far from the rest of the world. A lot of disaster relief funding is federal. It’s been undeniably challenging that we’re the first part of the world to be dealing with these massive community shifts due to climate change, but it’s also good to be at the beginning of the process. The instant the rest of the population has to deal with it, too, there’s not going to be any money left to move tiny little Alaskan villages. Once New Orleans and San Francisco and Manhattan have a climate change problem, that’s the end of our help. We’re trying to figure out how to handle these moves now, and what we’re going to do when the resources to handle them get diverted to larger population centers. That’s the Arctic problem.

Earlier this month, The University of Pennsylvania’s Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology unveiled its Project 2100: An Atlas for the New Green Deal, a collection of over 100 maps and drawings visualizing the current and future effects of climate change across the continental United States. Compiled in collaboration by professors and students at the university's Stuart Weitzman School of Design, the atlas is meant to serve as a resource for policymakers, planners, and communities looking to take up the call of the Green New Deal.  Project 2100 approaches the spatial implications of climate change in its broadest sense, showing a range of ecological, atmospheric, agricultural, political, economic, and social factors of American life. It expresses the effects and challenges of climate change not just in temperature values, sea-level changes, and natural disasters, but through agricultural production, income distribution, immigration and displacement patterns, conservation efforts, population growth, as well as college and university location. Through the map, users can draw connections between these disparate elements under the current climate regime. In addition to describing the country’s climate reality, it is prescriptive about the necessary steps for mitigating the effects of climate change. According to the atlas, for instance, 1,834,337 wind turbines and 26,190,30,857 solar panels would be needed to provide energy for the growing population over the next century. The researchers and contributors of the atlas do not shy away from the massive scale and aim of such a project. “Much like the Apollo program set a goal of sending a man to the moon before it was clear what technology it would take to succeed, so too can the Green New Deal set ambitious goals that can be met by mobilizing the public sector,” reads a statement from the project team.  Despite the dire situation the map expresses, the tone of the project remains overwhelmingly hopeful. “The reality is that we’ve never actually tried to craft a national response to these threats," said Billy Fleming, Wilks Family Director of The McHarg Center. "We won’t know what we’re capable of achieving until, as the Green New Deal demands, we mobilize our communities, resources, and government around climate action." He continued: “It's in this space where the Green New Deal seems likely to land—in the massive expansion of government as a force for good in the everyday lives of most people akin to that of the New Deal, and in the marshaling of public procurement and standards to drive the private sector towards a shared set of goals. It requires that we know the destination, but not the path; it requires a bit of backcasting.”

The New York and Seoul–based Obra Architects, along with Front Inc., Obra Abrim, Dongsimwon Landscape, and Supermass Studio, have created an oasis of “perpetual spring” in a public courtyard in Seoul. Supported by Korea’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art as part of their exhibition The Square: Art and Society, the experimental pavilion features 150 polycarbonate “eyes” that look into a lush venue full pf weather designed to be blissful year-round. This Climate Correcting Machine does away with fall and winter to comment on the ongoing climate crisis and how environmental conditions shape how we coexist with one another. The high-concept greenhouse uses an adaptable climate control system with photovoltaic panels on the museum’s roof powering exhaust fans, aluminum curtains, and phase-change radiant floor-heating to keep the space in constant vernal equilibrium. A garden, one that normally could only survive outdoors in spring, will be growing throughout the colder months while digital displays provide info to visitors on global environmental data. The architects suggest that the season of spring is conducive not only to happiness and socializing, but to progressive values, debate, and organizing, citing events like the 1968 Prague Spring and the 2010 Arab Spring. In that spirit, the installation is designed to be a gathering point and venue for programming such as lectures, readings, and performances, as well as discussion groups. “There can be a lot of elitism in how museums are curated, this opens it up to anyone,” explained Obra principal Pablo Castro. In addition, various guests have been invited to discuss issues related to democracy and the ongoing climate emergency. The Climate Correcting Machine is a prototype for a larger “project with a capital P,” according to Castro. “We’re not building a particular space, but a deployable system.” Future systems, which are being developed along with Front and Arup, would have even more automated technologies, heating walls, and feature sensors both inside and at a distance that operate HVAC and lighting systems by taking into account approaching weather and “climactic inertia.”

New Yorkers know to take a step back when they see a “C” rating in the window of their favorite sushi spot. Now, the same labels will be required for buildings all over the city, but the letter grades will act as a report card for energy consumption—and yes, many buildings, including some shiny new ones, will get D’s.  The new grading system is part of the sweeping Climate Mobilization Act passed earlier this year, intended to reduce greenhouse emissions across New York City, where building emissions alone account for more than two-thirds of its total carbon footprint.  “People want to know what they are walking into, what they are living in and what their contribution to meeting their values are,” Melanie E. La Rocca, commissioner of the Buildings Department, told The New York Times. The city describes the labels as a step towards greater transparency surrounding the city’s carbon emissions. But, the regulation also acts as a shaming mechanism, pushing landlords one step closer to preparations for the energy consumption fines that are set to roll out in 2024.  The new law will require buildings over 25,000 square feet to post the regulatory signage “in a conspicuous location near each public entrance.” These letter grades will soon be a facade feature of over 40,000 of the one million buildings in New York City.  While it may seem logical that the older building stock of New York, like the sooty brick office buildings and old masonry factory lofts, would be the main energy guzzling culprits, there are many new structures that rank lower. Mid-century office buildings in the Financial District and Midtown use a tremendous amount of energy to keep internal corridors at optimum temperatures and fight losing battles to retain heat due to their old, single-pane glass walls. For these glass-and-steel skyscrapers, upgrades will be more expensive than just replacing old boilers.  The building types once considered most profitable in the office tower boom of the ’50s and ’60s are finally showing their weaknesses, as 21st-century workspaces have shifted their priorities towards open floor plans and smart design strategies for not only the planet but for the health of their employees. CEOs and landlords are beginning to recognize that respecting sustainability standards is an asset for property value and branding, and failure to do so can be damaging to their image.  While Ms. Dougherty admitted that “some buildings may be O.K with a C,” that attitude will likely change when tenants are charged with steep fines in 2024.