Fragile: Designs for Certain Uncertainty

Architecture developed directly as a solution to climate change is too often imagined as an apolitical, technologically driven project. Lacking a pathway towards scaling outcomes, it struggles to make meaningful impacts beyond the level of the individual building. By examining theories of resilience that challenge conventional perspectives on the way ecosystems operate and applying those lessons in an architectural context the need for a connective tissue is identified, that bridges the large problems that need to be addressed, but also functions at the scale where architects normally work. Through research into the architectural discourse concerned with dissolving boundaries of defined programming into spatial gradients this thesis proposes that the missing connective tissue is a form of environmental infrastructure concerned with mediating our relationship with the climate at a scale where real impact can be achieved. The task then is to come up with new ways to integrate architecture into this environmental infrastructure such that the collective capacity of architecture can be leveraged as an attractor of people. In so doing it becomes possible to identify an alternative capacity of architecture to combat climate change by bringing people and their activities into a more intimate relationship with the non-human environment and thus foster a sense of stewardship.