ADS3: Dry Spell

Since the privatisation of England’s water services in 1989, control over this vital resource for human and agricultural use has intensified. The financialisation of the water industry and the resulting inadequate infrastructure has exacerbated the impact of droughts, sewage pollution, and flash floods. These challenges, alongside post-Brexit agricultural strains, have raised critical concerns about the future of the UK's agrobiodiversity and food security. In 2024/25, ADS3 will delve into arid spaces and the creation of water scarcities across multiple scales: from the architecture of the seed to the gut; from refrigeration chambers to shipping containers; and from pipelines and ports to the planetary flows of water and edible commodities. The studio uses a research-led design methodology to chart how these forces scar the built environment, tracing human-engineered species and spaces, from genetic modification labs to fertiliser mines and settler-colonial regimes. Guided by queer entanglements and resistance to extractivism, ADS3 fosters forms of practice that advance spatial justice, while metabolising climate breakdown.

For centuries, climatic signals that formerly allowed humans to organise life around specific seasons have now become indicators of crisis. Phenomena like birds nesting too early, or trees holding onto leaves longer, are evidence of global warming; they expose new waves of ‘global weirding’ or ‘season creep’. Such ‘red flags’—unusual weather events, displacement, migrations and new ecological interactions—expose the increasing abilities of species to adapt, move, or succumb. This isn’t cli-fi. New mutant landscapes now include the tropicalisation of California, Caspianisation of the Great Lakes, and the Mediterraneanisation of the Black Sea.

Drought is not simply a lack of rainfall. Rather, it is shaped by a gradient of dryness that speaks of social and environmental histories of mismanagement, privatisation, and exploitation. Water is often diverted, pumped, contaminated, or consumed before reaching aquifer stores, stripping communities from their access and right to a vital resource.

Over centuries, this scarcity has contributed to displacement, plant die-offs, pollutant concentration, wildfires, and famine. Rather than addressing the systemic issues behind scarcity, inequality has often been exacerbated through violent and solutionist responses: from settler colonial projects to neoliberal financial models and geoengineering experiments; from land grabs and dams to desalination plants and large-scale water transfers. At the same time, increasing regulations have criminalised farmers for sowing, keeping, exchanging, and caring for their self-reproduced seeds, which are often highly drought-resistant, forcing them into buying agrochemical-dependent varieties instead. ADS3 will challenge these narratives by restoring water to a basic right and contributing to knowledges on how drylands and self-reproduced seeds can foster resilient forms of inhabitation within post-industrial ecologies. Such arid anthropogenic environments can offer new models of inhabitation that balance soil, salt, and water across human and more-than-human populations. Situated at the forefront of water politics, ADS3 explores how we might forge new alliances, dismantle structures of water appropriation, and create critical spaces for architectural practice.

Drought’s impact is not confined to agricultural land. It also shapes urban environments, as was made apparent by California’s lawn bans during the 2011-2017 drought, which mandated a shift toward a new urban aesthetic relying on non-irrigated plants. This change was so significant that ‘drought-shaming’ became common, altering the understanding of what cultivating ‘green’ spaces should look like. Through the lens of CLIMAVORE—a framework that explores how to eat as humans change climates—ADS3 uses architectural tools to map such ecological and legal struggles to live through, besides, and beyond drought.

Droughts manifest in meteorological, hydrological, and climatic forms, which are further exacerbated by human actions such as mismanagement, over-abstraction, and water diversion. ADS3 focuses on human-induced droughts as ongoing processes, rather than isolated events. The ‘site’ of the drought extends beyond a geographical location: the seed holds layers of spatial information; histories of land grabs, settler colonial violence, social networks, environmental conditions, legal frameworks, and access rights.

By exploring how both water and seeds are made and unmade, constructed and deconstructed, ADS3 will not only investigate how dry environments shape seeds, but also how seeds actively reshape these landscapes. This year, each project will begin by selecting a specific seed as an architectural site, mapping its global dependencies and interconnections to envision more equitable spaces within the broken food supply chains in a period of drought.

Seeds, particularly those that have self-reproduced over generations, are resilient to heat and water stress. They also actively participate in multispecial resistance, travelling via trade routes or natural currents, and frequently end up in unexpected places. Notable examples include fig trees thriving in the warm industrial waters of Sheffield after fig consumption was encouraged in the nineteenth century to treat constipation, or tomato seeds from London sewage rooting along the Kent coast. Unlike industrialised varieties, ‘peasant seeds’ sense and forecast atmospheric conditions, deciding when to block or trigger germination. This adaptive behaviour is driven by proteins in their outer membranes, which, like the skin of a building, respond to water potential, light and temperature. Seeds communicate with each other underground, coordinating germination as a collective survival strategy during times of drought. They get turned on by their neighbours and translate human failure in crop production into success for the plant’s progeny. As material witnesses to human-made scarcity, seeds play a critical role in indigenous movements and civic efforts to reclaim sovereignty over unceded lands through seed rematriation. They perform as interscalar vehicles, carrying knowledge of dried aquifers or dried-up streams, embodying generations of environmental memory.

The studio will begin with group work to build a shared glossary of dryland ecologies by mapping taxonomies, inhabitants, conflicts, borders, and ingredients. It will investigate how food resistance is activated in different contexts. Using the seed as a site, YR1 and YR2 students will develop individual design projects, experimenting with new presentation methods to translate research into spatial practices. Weekly tasks will explore performance and presentation techniques, encouraging proposals that extend beyond a single built form to include a range of tactics and strategies, which trace the seed’s journey across multiple landscapes.

ADS3 promotes interdisciplinary thinking, merging architecture and spatial practice with social engagement, food politics, environmental policy, performance, and on-site fieldwork. The studio will introduce new methods of research, documentation, and intervention, particularly within ecologically sensitive environments. Rather than relying solely on cartographic analysis, projects will reimagine these spaces as expansive systems where metabolic relationships connect different scales and multi-species networks. Studio sessions will be enhanced by weekly readings, individual and group tutorials, open discussions and guest lectures from interlocutors engaged in the CLIMAVORE x Jameel at RCA initiative, alongside fieldwork, studio trips and exhibition visits. The year’s Live Project and Field Trip will include collaboration with farmers in Southern Italy, offering students hands-on experience in addressing water scarcities and fostering spatial justice.

Bios:

Daniel Fernández Pascual & Alon Schwabe are the founders of Cooking Sections. In 2015 they coined the term CLIMAVORE, and set it up as a research framework, platform and agency to study food systems for the new seasons of the climate crisis. Tackling the extractive practices that led to them, their work advances new infrastructural horizons through collaborations with marine biologists, botanists, farmers, chefs, fisherfolk, anthropologists, oenologists, soil scientists, herders, and many others living on the frontiers of the climate emergency. They are the Principal Investigators of CLIMAVORE x Jameel at RCA.

Rosa Whiteley is an architectural researcher and designer who explores the intersection between architecture, ecology, and atmospheric politics. She is primarily interested in how toxic-chemical flows rearrange the worlds we live within and how weird ecologies interact with and through human-made atmospheres. In 2021, Operaciones Editorial published Rosa’s first book, Horizontas Rosados. Since 2019, Rosa has worked as a researcher and designer as part of Cooking Sections and she is the Director of Material Research for CLIMAVORE C.I.C. in the Islands of Skye and Raasay.