extreme environments

University of Virginia School of Architecture
Spring 2008
Instructor: Nataly Gattegno

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What are the implications of designing at the extreme – far beyond the normative? What is the relationship between energy and form?  What are the implications for design at the minimum or maximum? This blog will publish work generated in the Extreme Environments design studios at the University of Virginia School of Architecture taught by Assistant Professor Nataly Gattegno. It explores an expanded interpretation of site and context, by observing the diverse systems and processes that the extreme yields. Heat, sun, water, wind and rain: these have become our new definitions of site and context.

This studio investigates design at the limits of our inhabitable environments, by exploring the possibilities of generating habitable conditions at the edge of our comfort zones. We are exploring the relationship between energy and form, geometry and orientation, organization and distribution. From the desert subdivisions outside of Phoenix, Arizona, to floating artificial islands of global trash North of Hawaii, this studio is interpreting programmatic notions of extreme tourism and questioning the human need to inhabit every known corner of our planet. We are questioning our human impact and considering politically charged sites that have recently developed as tour sites [Three-Mile Island, Pennsylvania and the West Bank wall].

Site systems, site ecologies, hydrology, weather systems, wind patterns and the temporal nature of places are some of the datasets explored. What is the potential for design between micro and macro scales, changing and dynamic environments? Can we re-think and re-tool design in the context of a constantly changing world? How can design absorb and respond to change and temporality? How can one draw, explore and ultimately design – with and within – dynamic systems? Extreme Environments call for an adaptive approach to urban, suburban and infrastructural expansion in the postwar era. This necessitates a multidisciplinary approach, with the potential of interpreting “sustainability” as a strategically adaptive process in response to our environments, capable of yielding synthetic ecologies of inhabitation.