DEFENSIVE ECOLOGIES

Pratt Institute School of Design

Interior Design Undergraduate Senior Option Studio

[ description from syllabus ]

“No comets crashing, nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves. And all of it around people: how people were, how many of them there were, how they’d changed things just by being there…. But science, he said, had been the wild card, the twist.” From The Peripheral by William Gibson

We have entered an era in which the consequences of climate change are both obvious and undeniable. As designers, we are both responsible for and empowered by the provision of creative design-based solutions for the amelioration of the worst of these. We are also uniquely capable of envisioning a proactive future in which we might dictate possibilities through creativity, rather than simply being receptive to the designs of others.

This studio seeks to address both immediate and long-term questions relating to the survival and sustainability of the human species, while recognizing the importance of and utilizing the unique benefits of coexisting lifeforms to achieve those purposes. This will be accomplished through the creation of a defensive ecology; for the purposes of this studio, this term is defined as a human-driven intervention intended for anthropic inhabitation or use, as existing within the greater context of radically-altered global and local ecosystems. In taking the position that all aspects of the future design of human ecologies will necessarily contain defensive properties and capacities beyond the limited standard of the present, we will ask the question: how do we redefine our interior worlds of physical, social, and psychological comfort to prosper in a climate far past the exterior conditions of environmental equilibrium? By beginning at the granular scale of a specifically-programmed interior realm, how might we outwardly project a radical redesign of the human footprint, without abandoning the cultural aspirations that dictate the nature of human civilization? The desire of this studio is to propose strategic and tactical prototypes for homeostatic settlement, through the development of design that is both discrete and systemic, favoring concepts of permeability, modularity, adaptability, and mobility; it seeks to counter the cultural and physical rigidity of our present built environment through tools including morphological optimization, additive manufacturing, and the modeling of behaviors of complex adaptive systems.

In assuming an era in which all interior worlds must become prepared for exigent circumstances, what elements must be internalized for the safety and sanity of their inhabitants?  We must assume cohabitational contingency with nonhuman species as a key component in producing a sustainable future. How could we begin to develop new environments for living that embrace a range of biological systems within an inhabitable structure, in which residents may be decidedly nonhuman, and require separate yet often complimentary environmental qualities? Would these parallel systems be distinct formally, spatially, and texturally from our own, or would they interpenetrate and inform an architectural symbiosis that could benefit multiple species through their interactions? From subterranean protective shelters to vegetal furniture, mountain-clinging aeries to itinerant laboratory facilities, your projects will speculate on the ways in which our interior world can reflect the greater diversity of our ecosystem at large, in the creation of environments of adaptation in which both human and non-human can not only coexist but thrive. You will design an interior world that will examine the ways in which we as humans both survive and continue to operate as agents in the production of cultural significance, while engaging with the processes and potentialities of parallel species in the creation of a biosphere that exceeds the utilitarian in order to propose a rich and exciting future.