Towards an Anti-Antiutopia: Solarpunk Cities and the Precarity of Our Urban Future

This paper examines Darko Suvin’s and Kim Stanley Robinson’s assertion that the late-stage capitalism and neoliberalism of our world can be understood as an “antiutopia” that actively works to suppress the imagination of better futures. It argues that the relatively new science fiction sub-genre of solarpunk—which sets itself in direct opposition to the dystopian visions of the more well-known subgenre cyberpunk and imagines worlds that focus on the community rather than the individual, on environmental sustainability rather than environmental degradation, on social justice rather than subjugation and inequality, and on optimism rather than nihilism—offers some of the most promising paths toward the rejection of this antiutopia in favor of an anti-antiutopian (and therefore utopian) approach that actively works to bring about a better future. The paper suggests that the solarpunk futures currently emerging in literature, art, and online communities offer architects, landscape architects, and urban designers powerful inspiration for the future of our increasingly urban world. It examines a selection of short stories, novels, films, and other media—as well as innovative projects of urbanism—for examples of how embracing the practical utopianism of solarpunk can provide both visions of better worlds and potential paths for achieving them

Soft Knitted Tensile Membrane Tensegrity Helix-Tower

This paper explores project-based research approach for using knitted textiles as a participating element in a tensegrity structural system. The design of the tensegrity Helix-Tower takes advantage of the emergent elastic properties of knit material and the self-stress, self-stabilizing characteristics of tensegrity structures. The paper outlines the workflow for working with knit materials, including the feedback loop between small studies, digital models, and simulations, and from small to large prototypes. The resulting prototype is a 2.74-meter (9-foot) helix structured tensegrity tower, which is lightweight, deployable, and at a small architectural scale. The assembly process for the final construction is simple and requires no tools. The research is novel in its exploration of using knit membranes in tensegrity structures, resulting in a structure that is ultimately more flexible and responsive to movement than traditional tensegrity structures. The design also provides more interactivity with human bodies and the environment. The paper examines the benefits of knitted membrane, including their heterogeneity and uneven stretching. Which provides softness, flexibility, and more movement to the structure. However, questions remain regarding the potential for other environmental factors such as wind or water. Future work includes exploring the potential and problems of knitted compared to other materials used in tensegrity structures and examining the incorporation of the design into real architectural elements

Embodied Contradictions and Post-Industrial Built Environments: From Miner Hospital to Museum of Labor Medicine in Real del Monte, Mexico

In October of 2004, the Museo de Medicina Laboral (Museum of Labor Medicine), opened to the public in Real del Monte, State of Hidalgo, Mexico. The museum, located on the grounds of what had been the Hospital Minero (Mining Hospital), was a building complex conceived, built, and operationalized at the height of Mexico’s Industrial Revolution and the region’s only medical facility specializing in the healthcare needs of miners and their families. Utilizing historical analysis, the hospital reveals contradictions frequently embodied by the era’s Modernist built environments. Inaugurated in 1907, the hospital was the culmination of the United States Smelting Refining and Mining Company (USSRMC) and its Mexican subsidiary, Compañía Real del Monte y Pachuca’s (CRMyP) efforts to bring healthcare to its employees while maximizing production. On one hand, the hospital’s design and operation expressed an optimism wrought by the dissemination of positivist and utilitarian philosophies and economic growth spurred by technological innovation; on the other, growing wealth inequality and deteriorating, often brutal, labor conditions. Nearly 120 years later, the hospital again embodies a global reality. In contemporary post-industrialist economies, once these built environments cease being productive, they are usually abandoned or demolished; only a few are transformed and repositioned for other uses. As the region’s mining industry ceased productivity, the hospital was first abandoned and later rescued by a newly privatized enterprise that donated the medical building complex to a non-for-profit civil association focused on mining heritage. Now the Museum, an architectural expression that fused global and local economic, technological, and aesthetic sensibilities, has become an example of commodified didactic heritage

Insuring Artificial Stone

This paper examines experiments to increase the durability of architecture as a means to manage the risk of catastrophic loss through tangible systems of artificial material and intangible systems of insurance. At the intersection of these dyads is Coade’s Artificial Stone Manufactory conducting experiments in architecture to yield an ornament useful in securing capital from 1769 - 1821. Selling goods from the south bank of the River Thames in London, Coade’s made use of a catalog to mediate the global exchange between the site of production and construction. For architects and builders, these commodities construct a modern architecture relying upon cheapness, mass production, and abstraction. The utility of this artificial stone explicates a relationship between durability and catastrophic failure at work in the manufacture of modern architecture

Architectures of Coloniality: The Sherman Institute and the Indigenous Labor behind the Development of Southern California

The Owens Valley Paiute, traditional caretakers of the “Land of Flowing Water,” face continued threats to their livelihood due to decades of water extraction from the region by the city of Los Angeles. The precarious state of Indigenous lands and peoples across California is entangled with historical processes supported by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and the off-reservation boarding school system. During the first half of the twentieth century, Paiute, Mission Indian and other Indigenous youth were sent to the Sherman Institute in Riverside, the last of twenty-five boarding schools to be built and operated by the BIA. Accompanying its Mission Revival style façade and the associated narratives of racial uplift, the school aimed to distance students from tribal affiliations, teaching them Anglo, heteropatriarchal forms of domesticity, and training them to become wage laborers in the farming, construction, and domestic service trades. After graduation, many students were employed by the federal government to convert tribal lands to agricultural plots and private property, while many others found low-wage, unskilled positions in the building and maintenance of Southern California’s expanding metropolis. This paper investigates the role of the Sherman Institute in the exploitation of Indigenous lands and labor for regional development, and therefore, the production of racialized precarity for Indigenous peoples. By engaging with Indigenous epistemologies, the paper works to stretch the limits of history/theory, to expose systems of confinement for their racialized underpinnings, and to introduce more fluid conceptions of land, property, and personhood

Re-constituting Precarity for the BIM-Architect

As architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) practices become broadly mediated by computational methods, this article considers the modes of precarity implied for the architect adopting BIM as a medium of modelling and design. Situating the computational apparatus as a prosthesis to the BIM-architect, the article outlines the degree of agency configured for operators of BIM applications while they utilize the structures and methods of software pre-programmed by the application’s original developers. Exploring the structures of Autodesk Revit’s database via the Application Programming Interface (API), the paper interrogates the rationale and logic of building encoded by the program through a reading of its operative code in textual form. Situating an interplay between the Revit-architect and application, who programmes a building model while their intention and conceptualization is programmed in turn, the conditions of precarity installed for the Revit-architect as operator are considered as a result of their limited capacity to modify the programme’s operative methods. Drawing from a political history of technology to interrogate the distributed agency between the Revit-architect and technical apparatus, the article ultimately explores how the architect might adopt the phenomenal experience codified by the procedural operations of algorithms through alternative means. It concludes by drawing from autoethnographic practice and situated experiences at the site of the author’s studios, offering material from which to construct an alternative and differentiated notion of algorithm-aided modelling and design according to a nuanced attention to the depth of building

Towards Designing for the Postdigital Hybrid Workplace: A Systematic Literature Review

This paper frames the future workplace as a postdigital hybrid space of practice that foregrounds humanistic values and holistically accommodates various requirements of individuals and collectives who make up the socio-cultural context of the workplace, wherever work may occur. However, to move towards designing for the postdigital hybrid workplace, it is necessary to first have an overview of the requirements foreseen for the future of workplace that are pertinent to notions of the postdigital and hybridity within the scholarly domain. On this basis, the paper presents a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) of workplace design and management literature (2010-2022) informed by the PRISMA 2020 guidelines. Studies were sourced through Scopus and Google Scholar, and screened for comprehension, relevancy, and certainty. Studies were appraised for quality before inclusion in the SLR, using a framework that combines a Weight of Evidence (WoE) framework (Gough 2007) with a set of appraisal criteria that can be used in qualitative research (Hannes 2011). Through a thematic analysis of the final 37 studies, the following seven requirements were identified: 1) embodied, intuitive and multimodal experiences, 2) a balance between privacy and interaction, 3) environmental comfort, 4) disconnection, 5) a culture that empowers the individual, 6) social territories and collective synergies, and 7) heterogeneity. The paper discusses that collectively the requirements identified signify the importance of the socio-spatial context in which work occurs. Therefore, as the ecosystem of work continues to change and adapt to hybridity, changes in meanings, perceptions and behaviours related to these requirements should be further investigated in order to better support design and management strategies. In addition, the paper acknowledges the inevitable juxtapositions of opposing expectations and requirements in a flexible workplace, and brings light to the behavioural, temporal and connectivity dimensions under which rivalling issues should be considered for a postdigital hybrid workplace

Computational Review and Assessment of The Urban Heat Island Effect and Its Impact on Building Space Conditioning

This paper reviews and reports the recent progress and knowledge on the specific impact of the urban heat island (UHI) effect on building space conditioning for vulnerable housing where lack of air conditioning and fuel poverty causes indoor overheating, thus increasing vulnerability. Previous studies demonstrated that the increase of the ambient temperature due to UHI and heat waves impacts adversely cooling energy consumption of buildings and raises the peak electricity demand during summer and heat waves. Given the aging and dilapidated housing conditions in low-income communities, mostly of color and minorities, the economic burden of the cooling energy penalty induced by urban overheating is higher. However, literature on overheating is primarily driven by the physical characteristics of the building such as insulation, albedo, and envelope properties, and the Heat Vulnerability Index (HVI) by demographic data such as age, income, education largely remains isolated thus failing to capture the overall understanding of heat vulnerability and the role architects/urban designers can play in mitigation. Through a computational query review of the last fifteen years of publication, we are inquiring, about how UHI impacts building energy consumption in low-income and poor-quality housing and what role city and housing characteristics play in indoor overheating. Our study suggests, that in the US, due to segregated historic planning policies, low-income houses are often located in low tree canopy areas with varying urban typologies, and higher impervious material which substantially increases the air temperature thus determining energy consumption and anthropogenic heat release which contribute to present-day inequitable exposure to intra-urban heat. Both housing characteristics and the location of housing play a crucial role as similar housing will experience different exposure to intra-urban heat if not located in a heat canyon. Through this literature review, it became evident that there is a gap in the research that fails to connect building characteristics and overheating with heat vulnerability. Research involving UHI and heat vulnerability has continued to advance through energy analysis and mitigation studies, but future studies need to redefine the HVI index, especially by incorporating city and housing characteristics, which can help architects/urban designers make informed design decisions

The Missing Link: Telecommunications, Tropical Postmodernization, and the Production of Precarity in the Philippines, 1972–Present

For the vast majority of agricultural workers in the tenant peasantry class, the direct relation to a landscape valorized by a plantation economy is simultaneously a constantly mediated, ever-precarious economic relation to global capital. Since 1945, discourses of development have only deepened extractive and deeply unequal modes of governance and sociality in this context and across the Global South*. It is in this context that I aim to assess the politicized technics of precarity, weather prediction, and economics of agriculture in the Philippines under the authoritarian rule of Ferdinand Marcos. In studying the Philippines during its violent neoliberal transformation period, I hope to extract an ideal portrait of the environmental, technological, and economic logics of postcolonial globalization. To do so, I will assess a subtle yet crucial point in the Philippines’ history of science, technology, and the environment: the implementation of a meteorological telecommunications network and Marcos’s reordering of these stations as the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration, or PAGASA (meaning “hope” in Tagalog). By understanding the several scales of political economy at work in direct relation to such a network, this paper seeks to illuminate the multiple dimensions of social instability rooted in the Philippine government’s neoliberal conflation of environment and economy. The architectures and technologies of network, then, highlight the numerous ways in which weather forecasting, agricultural production, and political control intersect in infrastructural development

Post-pandemic Office Spaces: : Considerations and Design Strategies for Hybrid Work Environments

This research investigated renovation considerations and design strategies for post-pandemic, hybrid office environment within an academic institution. The focus was on two case-study office spaces that are part of the same organization at the University of Utah, where the existing physical space was insufficient for future growth and non-functional for its novel, hybrid work mode structure. The objective was to evaluate the physical conditions of the existing office spaces, to investigate the employees’ working patterns and office culture, and to propose renovation strategies that would meet both the current and the projected future needs that support a hybrid work structure. The study was based on mixed-mode research methods, which included qualitative and quantitative methods. Qualitative methods included archival and empirical research of the existing office space conditions, as well as users’ input through online survey and focus group interviews. Using the latest, as-built construction drawings and current state photographs, 3D BIM models of each of the two office wings were developed, inclusive of their structural elements, partition walls, existing lighting fixture locations and specific furniture arrangements. These models were then used for egress, circulation, daylighting, and existing space planning analysis. Literature review was also conducted, identifying rising trends and design considerations for hybrid office workflow. Surveys and focus group interviews were conducted with current employees of the two offices to evaluate work patterns and space needs through user insight. Meanwhile, quantitative methods included quantitative analysis of the survey and focus group interview results, computational modeling, and visualization of the existing and proposed design strategies, as well as a review and validation of final design’s egress and accessibility compliance. Through several design option iterations, these results were used to provide space planning strategies and recommendations that meet the specific needs of these two office spaces. The final design, which considered users’ input regarding team dynamics, work schedules, and specific space and function needs, achieved a significant improvement in balances between team and individual space functions, private and public circulation, access to daylight and accessibility, while respecting the existing wall partitions, egress paths and occupancy counts. Moreover, the design solutions provided inclusive, comfortable, and functional spaces that catered to the specific work culture and individualized needs of employees. While this research focused on two specific case-studies, results demonstrate that through a user-integrated approach, significant improvements can be achieved to provide well-functioning spaces and a more comfortable and inclusive working environment. Additionally, the presented process that focuses on user-input and participation in the renovation design process can be applied to other existing, traditionally structured office spaces when transitioning to a hybrid office structure