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





Becoming Biomass
Geoffrey Thün, Kathy Velikov
2024

06

Becoming Biomass is a design research project that imagines a future cooperative-managed agroforestry and biomanufacturing transformation within the state of Tennessee as part of the nation’s decarbonization effort. The broader project describes two episodes in the region’s biomaterial transition: a historical narrative uses visual archival material to situate the Tennessee Valley Authority’s 1933 forestry program, and a speculative future scenario set within the context of the transition toward a bio-based material economy. The project deploys methods of narrative and speculative scenario building to envision a multi-scalar and multi-system regenerative future for the region and its human and nonhuman constituents. It is situated in the context of justice-oriented decarbonization, simultaneously dismantling carbon-based material economies and exploitative socio-economic structures. The project advances visualization techniques to describe territorial and social transitions. These include projective cartographies, actor network drawings, territorial scripts, temporal notations, and scroll drawings. The video tracks three digital scroll drawings developed for the project. These drawings investigate the visualization of the more-than-technical, more-than-human, and the more-than-visible aspects of a design proposition that speculatively reimagines the world and its systems at multiple scales.

Additional credits:
Project in collaboration with Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller; 
Design Research Assistants: Eilis Finnegan, Richard Hua, Emma Powers, Sophie Pacelko, Chengdai Yang, Daniel Tish, Abraham Ramirez, and William Pyle