climate

futures


On view at the Liberty Research Annex
October 17, 2024 - January 1, 2025


about
projects
  1. 22/26 Midwest
  2. Ambiguous Territory
  3. Annotation and Insulation
  4. Asutsuare Rebound
  5. Atlas of the Trans-Apocalypse
  6. Becoming Biomass
  7. Bespoke Ultra-Thin Layered 3D-printed Reusable Wood-Bio-Based Formwork for Casting Complex Concrete Geometries
  8. Branch Wall: Geometrically Informed Non-Planar Toolpath and Material Deposition
  9. Deploy 2.0
  10. Detroit Cultural Center
  11. Elephant in the Room, and Other Fables
  12. Fabric-Formed Unstabilized Poured Earth
  13. Frie(s/d)
  14. Functionally Graded Additive Manufacturing
  15. Guidance for Designing and Implementing Constitutionally Valid Local Plans and Regulations to Protect Landmarked Trees, Woodlands, and Tree Canopy in Michigan
  16. Heat and Housing: Co-producing Passive Cooling Strategies and Promoting Health in Informal and Precarious Settlements
  17. Hygroscopic Envelope: Building Enclosures for Climate Adaptation
  18. In My Backyard
  19. In-Svalbard: Cold Coast Atlas
  20. Land, Foodways, and Kinship: The Case of Palestinian Villages
  21. Light Forms
  22. MiCE Architecture: Design Strategies to Mitigate Michigan Coastal Erosion
  23. Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit
  24. Myco-Composite Furniture
  25. Post Rock Post-Industrial Plastic Facade
  26. re:FE Reimagining Mining Waste from a Wounded Region
  27. Shell Wall: Coupling Non-Planar Robotic 3D Concrete Printing and Topology Optimization
  28. Solar Technology Integration on Building Facades
  29. The Canopy
  30. The Lifespan Project
  31. Unfolding Forms of Conveyance
  32. Urban Climate Law Series
  33. Vertical Wetlands





Annotation and Insulation Ana Ozaki and Ryan Ball        2024

03



Inspired by the Maison Tropicale’s panel, Annotation and Insulation conveys the co-production of climate and architecture. Co-production, a concept developed by STS scholar Sheila Jasanoff (2006), is based on the inseparability between the ways of knowing the world and how we seek to organize and control it. In responding to climatic conditions of the tropics, climate-responsive architecture produces a politically charged discourse of climate. Designed by Jean Prouvé (1949-1951) to be mass-produced, the Maison Tropicale was seen as the answer to the colonial occupation of French Africa, specifically Brazzaville, Republic of the Congo.

Using annotational strategies inspired by Black feminist and postcolonial theories, this piece reinterprets Prouvé’s acclaimed porthole panel using a repurposed foam mattress. The panel stands for the rainscreen and its intended continuous exterior insulation between the exterior (the tropics) and the interior (European). Removing its aluminum outer layer exposes the insulating foam, a common material in mattress toppers, revealing fraught ideals of domesticity and comfort and established technical insulation standards. Each porthole has been filled with portal windows and visual annotations to specific categories of failure, including technical and racial assumptions regarding the tropics, to contextualize Eurocentric standards and approaches to architectural detailing.