Time's Arrow

Time's Arrow

It’s been a crazy summer. Heat, drought, fires, floods. Almost biblical, but sadly climate change is here and deeply human. We need to adapt to survive. Architecture and landscape must do the same.

We will start semester in the garden with a project to launch the next ten years of adaptation to our changing climate. Learning from syntropic permacultures, we will pursue a process of slow transformation to make the garden more resilient. The garden has designed, planted, made and grown over the past decade. It is dense and does not need to be expanded but it does need radical change to survive. It will need new structures to sustain its plant and animal life. Most urgently, need to distribute and hold water in the ground. Some plants will thrive while others perish. We will learn from the existing and make adjustments through careful observation.

Folies of Resilience

This semester, we ask you to design and build two Folies of Resilience, new structures that will be the first steps towards greater climatic resilience and collective use. The first will be an aqueduct. A structure to carry rainwater from the tanks beside the Water Barn (2024) to the Fountain (2022) which is the heart of gatherings.

The second structure will be for our avian friends. Birds of prey are critical to the wider Honggerberg ecosystem and to control the spread of mice in the garden. We will ask you to design a series of perches to encourage the birds to watch over our garden.

The garden will be the primer for the rest of semester dedicated to resilience on the Limmat, to what will be required for the environment to survive the coming years of climate change.

The Longest Public Space

The Limmat is the longest continuous public space running through the city. It has changed and been redesigned many times over the centuries but nevertheless retains echoes of its natural formation. We will document the protected heritage buildings places of stability along a space that is physically and spatially fluid. Heritage protection is a form of resilience. But alone it won’t ensure survival. We need to look at the surrounding landscape to help find means of adaptation. The banks of the Limmat have been canalised and the flow engineered from far beyond its banks. Now the riverbanks are being renaturalised for flood attenuation and increased biodiversity. Infrastructures for leisure and waste are threaded above and below the surface.

Observation and documentation is the first act of design. We will document what exists, what’s working, what’s not working, the natural and the constructed. We will expand the knowledge of what exists by reading the absence of what has disappeared. While protected buildings act as temporal landmarks, fixed positions from which to travel through time to investigate what we have lost and how that may inform what has yet to come.

It’s about Making

We shall take a forensic approach to documenting the materials and traditional crafts to reveal what makes them durable, repairable, adaptable and useful– in short, resilient. It would be argued that conservation practices have grown a quiet revolution in radical ecological architecture. Are the crafts and techniques associated with repair and restoration a natural means to bioregional building or are they obsolete in the digital age.

Presuming that protection should be given to everything, what should survive in the future and how? Heritage is only the beginning. We will ask you to designed a meta-architecture made of reality and ghosts to propose a vision for a resilient future.