Workshop for the design of settlements in extreme environments, focused in process design. Organized joint to the School of Architecture of the Universidad Católica de Chile and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Year: 2017
Role: Professor.
Team: Paloma González (Director), José Hernández (Professor), José Miguel Armijo (Organizer), Juan Pablo Ugarte (Organizer), Alejandro Weiss (Organizer), Jimmie Harris (TA).
Participants: Ammar Ahmed (MIT), Blanca Valdés (PUC), Catherine Lie (MIT), Cristina Clow (MIT), Cristóbal Burgos (PUC), José Vilches (UCh), Juan Pablo Meniconi (UCh), Luis Mosquera (UCh), MyDung Nguyen (MIT), Noora Aljabi (MIT), Ricardo Walker (PUC), Seung Woo Han (AA), Stefano Rossi (PUC), Xhulio Binjaku (MIT).
Partners: Universal Projects, Architecture School PUC, MIT Design and Computation Group, Center of the Atacama Desert PUC.
Funding: MIT MISTI Chile
Humanity has relentlessly sought to conquer and inhabit high-risk environments, forcing design and technology to tame these extreme conditions for us. Exploration excitement and scientific initiative have been enough motivation to reach the farthermost places on the globe. In parallel, current planetary conditions forces us to build in areas with natural disasters, in areas with high pollution, with scarcity of resources and with socio-political threats. Going beyond the earth, any place is a threat to human survival in every possible way.
Technological advancement increases the range of places where humans can settle. However, the real challenge is how to make the inhabitation of such places more fail-safe, faster and less expensive. As Brunelleschi set the example, to achieve this it is necessary to foresee the design of the entire process, not just the buildings. This is why this workshop revolves around the idea of process design oriented toward digital fabrication.
Designing for extreme environmental conditions demands an integrated effort between design and technology in many levels. At the most general level, it requires to deal with potential hazards, such as scarcity, extreme temperatures, atmospheric conditions, chemical and biological threats or radiation. The next challenge is to make building operations more efficient in a scarcity state, and transport to site a network of productive processes and skillful work. Then, we need innovative solutions to undertake assembly, including the required machinery and specialized workers as well as the facilities to host them during construction. The final level is related to the temporal progression of the settlement and its obsolescence, giving flexible approaches to inhabitation and material cycles.
