ADS6: Local Adaptation: Coronas, Sun Dogs, and Mirages

Local adaptation is both an idea and a methodology. In biology, local adaptation refers to when a population of organisms has evolved to be more well–suited to their environment than other members of the same species. ADS6 asks the question if this principle was applied to architecture what would be the outcome? What is an architecture of local adaptation to climate, culture and context? ADS6 will continue to explore this question by taking a highly contextual and sensitive approach to investigating and intervening in a place, which we examine through the lens of hands–on physical making and material investigations.

As Reyner Banham noted in his landmark Architecture of the Well-tempered Environment (1984), there are two different kinds of environmental aids: the structural type, which includes all forms of enclosure from building to clothing; and the technological type, which has the campfire as its archetype, and the air conditioning unit and regulated building systems as contemporary equivalents.

The origins of architecture lie in the human need to mediate our environment. Before the mass excavation of fossil carbon, vernacular architecture and urban design were fundamentally based on the local climate and developing ingenious solutions using the building materials that were available to hand. Roof forms in Northern Europe were optimised to shed a particular type and quantity of rain, street patterns in southern Europe were orientated to shade the streets and harness breezes for natural ventilation. Cheap energy and advances in the technological solutions for heating and cooling had the effect of breaking the link between architecture and its environment, contributing to the current climate emergency. In response, ADS6 seeks to re-examine the potential links between architecture and natural processes that are the fundamental building blocks of the natural world. We seek to investigate and understand sunlight, daylight, air movement, precipitation, humidity, and temperature.

In his book Climatic Architecture (2023), Phillipe Rahm argues 'If the raison d’etre of architecture is climatic… Could the tools of architectural compositions become meteorological …[so that] convection is the new symmetry, conduction the new alignment, emissivity the new decoration. Meteorological phenomena are the new means of composing, designing spaces, structuring cities and arranging interiors’. Our mode of operation for the year will be to forensically investigate, analyse, observe, draw, and model environmental conditions. We will make tools to visualise the information being collected. We will propose and construct ways to manipulate this condition and in doing so form an architectural proposition.

In her essay ‘Contested Terrain’, Ella Hubbard argues for the localism of the ‘bioregion’ in response to the ‘great disconnect between our livelihoods and the material conditions which support them’ [1]. We can regenerate the planet by understanding and regenerating the bioregion. Climatic and environmental phenomena are intrinsically site specific. In the natural world, the sun, wind, and rain are all aligned with the underlying geology, providing generative rules for the ecologies and ecosystems that come to exist in that place. If the same rules are applied to architecture – and at each site of intervention these rules are locally understood and embedded at the beginning of the design process – then the results will be inherently responsive to their specific environment. providing a method for creating a passive and responsive architecture.

What do we mean by local? And what are its limits?

As we live in a globally interconnected world, what can we learn about living sustainably from investigating the local? Environmental phenomena do not exist in isolation. They are part of large-scale networks and systems that can even extend beyond the planetary scale. By starting locally, ADS6 ask students to consider the territory of the natural system they are interested in. We will look at the concept of Bioregionalism and how it suggests economic and social activities can be more sustainable if they work within the constraints of natural boundaries or bioregions, rather than within purely economic[1] or political constraints. Buckminster Fuller’s ‘World Game’ (1961) is an important precursor to this way of thinking. The topic of bioregionalism is currently the focus of the Design Museum’s online research forum, The Future Observatory Journal. To understand scale and interconnectivity, we will take inspiration from Charles and Ray Eames’ timeless Powers of Ten (1977), which explored orders of magnitude to allow viewers to look closely and from far away.

As architects we need to understand the consequences of using materials and products. Contemporary supply lines are complex and energy intensive. Can we address this issue by looking locally?

In 2023/24, ADS6 focused on the use of earth in the hot arid climate of Morocco. This year, a material palette will be developed in relation to the context of each site the students choose to work with. The starting point for this discussion will be the destination for our field trip in southern China which we will visit in the reading week of Term 1. On return to the UK students will select sites for study for the rest of the year and will undertake material investigations related to their choice. This will be supported by a number of visits throughout the year to Grymsdyke Farm, the workshop and digital fabrication facilities directed by Guan Lee. The farm is located on the edge of the Chiltern Hills; a chalk escarpment 35 miles from central London that has been designated as an area of outstanding natural beauty with a distinctive natural and cultural heritage, with a population of 10,000 people. The natural resources in this area include clay, chalk, flint, and timber. Grymsdyke Farm is located on a clay and flint bed and has been a subject of much of Guan’s own material research.

ADS6 seek to test the consequences of starting in one location and building outward. We seek to evolve an idea through continuous testing and iteration, without recourse to preconceptions or predetermined precedents. In this way, discoveries will be made that influence the next move, always building on an observation that originates in the selected location, but that the territory for which might be as small as the network of mycorrhizal fungi in a clod of earth, or as large as our planet’s meridional wind system. We use constructed analysis as an approach to measure a natural phenomenon and construct a response.

This year, we will begin with workshops that capture, record, and represent at 1:1 a specific moment, or moments, of a natural phenomenon, before looking at ways this phenomenon can become generative for architectural design. A fundamental aspect of this approach is to use 1:1 making and observation that has been enhanced by digital tools to extend the physical scope and timeframe of the bodily experience. To this end, the visual programming tool Grasshopper is particularly useful, encouraging the use of logic in both the analysis and optimisation of a problem. As a designer you determine the logic, the outcome, ‘the design’ and the most successful outcome is not something that any of us could have predicted or preconceived.

Your final projects will evolve in response to actual and virtual analysis and by the testing of propositions through material investigation and experimentation. They will examine, provoke, explore, reveal, and ultimately propose new ecologies, which prompt questions around how we relate to the natural environment in the anthropocene era. In 2024/25, the studio will produce a set of proposals that are uniquely adapted to their context.

The ADS6 live project will take place during our field trip to the historic town of Chikan, in Guangdong Province, southern China. Chikan is a small town located near the Tanjiang River, 140 kilometres from Guangzhou, on the outskirts of Kaiping County to the west of the Pearl River Delta. Guangzhou has a subtropical monsoon (wet-dry) climate, typical of southeastern China. From May to early October, the summer season is long, wet, hot, and humid, with south and southwest winds frequently accompanied by typhoons.

Chikan was a centre of emigration in the nineteenth century, with the local population seeking better living conditions in Southeast Asia and the West. By the late twentieth century, Chikan had fallen into neglect and in 2017, the Chinese government, local authorities, and the private fund CPE took on the challenge of reviving the town, with hopes of promoting its historic setting as a cultural destination. ADS6 will undertake a site-specific, analytical and locally adaptive installation for Chikan. We will use constructed analysis as the method, the town’s interiors as a canvas, and natural forces as a medium, to examine how the local climate could influence its architectural development.

The live project will be sponsored by CPE for ADS6, covering all expenses with the exception of the flights to China, and will take place during reading week in Term 1, at the end of October. Chikan may also serve as the site for students’ year-long project, although this is optional.

Note: [1] Ella Hubbard from her essay Contested Terrain, Future Observatory Journal Issue no. 1. https://fojournal.org/primer/contested-terrain/

Guan Lee

Guan is a practicing architect, lecturer and director of Grymsdyke Farm. He undertook his architectural studies at McGill University, Montreal, the Architectural Association, London, and Bartlett School of Architecture, where he completed his PhD on the relationship between architectural craft, making and site. In addition to his extensive experience as an educator, his own practice explores digital fabrication in relation to hands-on building processes in a range of materials, including clay, concrete and plaster.

Kate Darby

Kate is an Architect and principal of Kate Darby Architects. She studied architecture at the Bartlett and the Architectural Association where she later taught on the Design and Make programme at Hooke Park. She has previously led design units at the Bartlett, and the Welsh School of Architecture. She is recipient of the AJ Small Project Award and has been shortlisted for the Beazley Designs of the Year. She is co-founder of the collaborative workshop, Studio in the Woods and is an Invisible Studio collaborator.

Gianni Botsford

Gianni Botsford is an architect and founded Gianni Botsford Architects in 1996. He studied at Kingston University (82-85) and the Architectural Association, London (94-96), in Professor John Frazer’s Evolutionary Architecture Unit. He has taught at the Architectural Association, London Metropolitan University, and the Welsh School of Architecture, and is a founding group leader of the annual Studio in the Woods. He is the recipient of the RIBA’s Lubetkin Prize and Architectural Record Design Vanguard in 2008. Research projects with Arup into the optimisation and control of sunlight and daylight, and with Arup and ETH Zurich into Low Cost Sustainable Housing using CEB blocks are ongoing.