Initiated by Assistant Professor Meredith Miller and Sanders Fellow Dr. Etienne Turpin, "Architecture + Adaptation: Designing for Hypercomplexity" examines the intersections of extreme environmental circumstances and creative architectural production. Focusing on highly-dense urban locations that face the regular and damaging occurrence of inundation, the project will document the constituent forces and effects that pose challenges to normative architectural production. Relying heavily on situated research and observation through visual production, we conduct intensive site-based research and produce visual documentation and analysis of inundation effects on urban and architectural compositions.
The primary aim for the research initiative is to locate potential moments for architecture to intervene, as a mediation, adaptation, or coordination with ecological circumstances that operate at such a large scale and level of complexity that architecture tends to be disregarded as a potential agent of influence. As architecture struggles to find ways to exercise agency through socially and environmentally responsible practices, and as the discipline attempts to reorganize its commitments in the face ecological collapse, the "Architecture + Adaptation: Designing for Hypercomplexity" Research Initiative mobilizes collaborative, engaged, situated research to advance the pedagogical model of architecture education beyond the studio, and to build new connections for architecture research today.
The first in a series of research courses —INUNDATION Bangkok / INUNDATION Jakarta — is documented in detail according to research activities and categories. The joint Design Research Workshop— 'Jakarta: Designing for Hypercomplexity' — is being organized by Universitas Indonesia, Hong Kong University, Taubman College, and Ruangrupa Jakarta. The workshop is being held May 28-June 14, 2012.