NATALIA SYKOROVA 2019-20 YEAR 3

Eco-anxiety Centre and Extreme Temperature Shelter

First Class Honours

Chicago’s new home for mass eco-therapy shape-shifts to meet fluctuating demand in tune with the city’s ever-increasing extreme temperature events. Responsive fast- and slow-twitch building skins react to environmental change to establish a time-based, climate driven architecture. Subtle shifts in materiality and geometry are activated through temperature, rainfall and pressure differentials to create a series of dormant and active spaces, perpetually altering the building’s accessibility and functionality in response to changing programmatic need during these disasters.

The design builds upon current scientific research, conjectures and speculations, exploring the active architectural potential of predictive climate conditions and scenarios in the near and distant future. The spatial requirements of the dual function programme of therapy and shelter have an inverse relationship. As the extreme temperatures increase in frequency to become Chicago’s ‘new normal’, the need for therapy diminishes and the requirement for shelter increases. The building will adapt to these shifts, operating within a calibrated 100 year timespan, leading to therapy’s programmatic contraction and the shelter’s expansion. The therapy spaces pre-exist as a test-bed for the shelter, playing out as an environmental and social experiment at the architectural scale.

Tutors: Greg Storrar, Farlie Reynolds