What are these materials? What are these technologies and applications? In short, the study will explore new materials and innovative designs that are applicable to extreme living conditions.“The fascination of architecture in extreme environments is that it is so demanding technically, yet offers so much potential… the greatest constraint usually comes from the need not to spoil the natural environment, and that demands more judgment than the need to match the brickwork of an adjoining building.”Įditor: Ruth Slavid (Laurence King Publishing, 2009)Īs we presently hear more and more each day about the environment and what design professionals can do to turn the tide on total systemic collapse, it may do us well to ponder the extreme scenarios that a designer could face, whether in a Kalahari summer or an Antarctic winter. To meet the challenges of Climate Change and our planets limited resources, we as architects and engineers are developing new materials and technologies for near Extreme Environmental change.īuildings will constitute a primary challenge in the ’battle’ to mitigate the causes and effects of climate change, in that, primarily, we tend to spend a very large share of our time in them which I am trying to explore as an architect’s point of view, and applied to architectural design. Parallel to this reality, science and technology have new and innovative approaches and solutions than what is currently applied to building design and construction.

Global industrialized processes in architecture often abandon site-specific knowledge in architectural design traditions and spatial qualities that have allowed for sustainable and resilient designs.

Architecture extreme conditions