Erratic Architecture: Building at Nature’s Far Edge

Abstract

This seminar investigates architecture at nature’s far edge, where human construction encounters environments and climates considered to be extreme: the very cold, the very hot, the very high, the very deep; the very arid, the very swampy, the very toxic, the very glaciated, the very eruptive; the remote and the abyssal, the alpine and the subterranean, the oxygen-thin and the radiation-soaked.

Objective

Students in this course will become familiar with multiple literatures drawn from a wide range of disciplines and will work with primary architectural sources of various kinds. Particularly emphasis will be given to relations between architecture and other structures of knowledge and epistemologies, identifying novel architectural interventions, and close readings of environments and settings.

Content

This seminar explores architecture at the thresholds of habitability where human construction meets elemental extremity. From alpinism refuges and polar stations to undersea laboratories, nuclear test sites, and lunar habitats, we will follow how building has continually reached toward nature’s far edge. The term erratic—borrowed from the displaced glacial boulders that once bewildered Swiss naturalists and helped reveal the Earth’s deep time—serves here as a figure for architecture’s own inconstant condition. We focus on the precarious architectural settings amid those environments and climates considered to be extreme: the very cold, the very hot, the very high, the very deep; the very arid, the very swampy, the very toxic, the very glaciated, the very eruptive; the remote and the abyssal, the alpine and the subterranean, the oxygen-thin and the radiation-soaked. These anomalous encounters unfold in the middle of earthquakes or magmas, lightning bolts or tornados, sun-scorched deserts or snow-capped mountaintops—moments and sites where the built world brushes against the volatilities and vehemences of geology and atmosphere alike. Each structure conceived to withstand or keep in check an erratic situation, whether a weather station, fallout bunker, or volcanic observatory, not only discloses the instability it seeks to cope with but reveals instability itself as a fundamental condition with which all human settlement must reckon. In tracing the tangential points where architecture and the erratic touch, the seminar asks how, at nature’s far edge, building and environment enter a restless pact of mutual redesign, where every attempt to hold the world still sets it in motion once again.

Resources