PROFESSOR

STUDIO

The studio starts with stories that make worlds in the context of a changed climate. Climate SF novels by authors such as Ursula K. Le Guin, J.G. Ballard, Bruce Sterling, Octavia E. Butler, Margaret Atwood, Pablo Bacigalipi, Kim Stanley Robinson. We consider these texts not as futurisms but as “the realism of our time.” They critically explore not only the possibilities of technology but the political, social, ideological, and ecological systems within which it is entangled. We immerse ourselves in the worlds of these narratives as a design site and milieu. The work of the studio operates tendril-like, trading strings with these authors in multiple directions. If architecture is to think beyond its current condition, it is our prerogative to pull open the spaces of our world, to imagine alternative possibilities, to prototype these fragments, and to explore their implications.

In dialogue with each novel’s worldbuilding, its socio-political framework, and its environmental agency, students project, propose, and explore their novel's architectures, micro-architectures, and urbanisms in further detail. Student projects expand on the thought experiment of the novel through the media of design and material speculation. Drawing on the practices of “design fiction,” these are spatio-material experiments that develop new fragments of the possible; a possible existence within the societal context of a changed and rapidly changing climate.