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





Atlas of the Trans-Apocalypse
Andrew Herscher                           2024

05

The end result of climate catastrophe is, in most versions of the story, the end of the world. And yet, across the planet, multitudes of worlds have already been ended by synergistically-related environmental calamities produced by colonialism, capitalism, and their catastrophic interactions. World-ending, that is, forms a large part of colonial and capitalist histories. One way to mark the contemporaneity of this world-ending is through the term “trans-apocalypse”--an ongoing ending of the world in its current form. In the winter of 2024, students in Andrew Herscher’s seminar, “Architecture in the Trans-Apocalypse,” explored ways in which to ethically, equitably, and justly live within ongoing, unpredictable, and exacerbating climate catastrophes.

In Atlas of the Trans-Apocalypse, students developed scenarios for cities across the planet at future moments of their choosing. In so doing, they brought their skills in design and visualization to imagine what it will be like to live in future climate-challenged worlds. Can architecture disavow its investments, both practical and metaphysical, in techno-solutionist versions of progress in order to prophetically witnesses current climate catastrophes? Can this prophetic witnessing yield histories of future catastrophes that we might still try to avoid or ameliorate? The work collected in Atlas of the Trans-Apocalypse prompts these and related questions about ways in which architecture can engage climate catastrophe.

Additional credits:
Students in F24 seminar “Architecture in the Trans-Apocalypse”