Matt Fajkus and Daniel Garcia

The City of Austin Office of Sustainability and The UT Austin School of Architecture

Sustainable Design Between Global and Local Systems

matt fajkus daniel garcia

The City of Austin Office of Sustainability has a vision to ensure Austin is a thriving, equitable, and ecologically resilient community.1 There are multiple strategies to achieve these ideals, including aiming for a balance of climateadaptivity and a consideration of human factors and demographics. The Office of Sustainability partnered with the UT Austin School of Architecture design studio courses taught by Matt Fajkus over two semesters to brainstorm and develop design ideas, which produced provocations that made it all the way to the Austin City Council docket for discussion about implementation.2

A “middle ground” is the place between two extremes — not a compromise but a synthesis. When considering where it exists, one must first acknowledge the spectrum we are a part of, from the perspective of an individual in a community to a global citizen. We must also be humble and acknowledge that our recent history of the past one hundred, or even 1,000, years represents a small fraction of time, albeit a pivotal one, in the existence of human civilization. In this time, civilizations have risen and fallen, yet humans have endured. Throughout this history, a constant has existed: the fundamental threats driven by climate change, ranging from fire to flood, famine, and drought. These realities call for questioning how we reconcile our relationship to nature, our notions of comfort and convenience, and our ability to tolerate risk.

Resiliency is the capacity to respond and adapt to changing conditions, and at its essence, design is about response. Sustainable design not only strives for functional efficiency and experiential factors but also aims to maintain or regain functionality in or after a given stress or disturbance. Resilience is both response and action; it involves articulating or blurring boundaries between nature, city, landscape, and building design, all while accommodating the human scale. Contemporary global crises — including racial and social justice, a pandemic, political divisiveness, and climate change and its impacts — are colliding at multiple scales.

PAST/PRECEDENT

Both within academia and practice, great effort is now being increasingly placed on the proactive pursuit to analyze, understand, and control environmental threats, which go beyond just those that are naturally occurring, in order to be able to “sustain” ourselves perpetually. Yet, with such emphasis on discovering both novel and innovative solutions, it is easy to forget our longer history as a species and look upon the sophisticated human responses by past civilizations who have overcome similar threats utilizing parallel “modern” modes of living. This acknowledgment of time, evolution, and iteration has many lessons to teach, and perhaps the most significant is that there is no final solution to such threats. Additionally, to suppose that any technology and/or tool was sufficient, and did not bring its own set of consequences, is important to note. While technology and tools extend our capabilities and offer convenience, it is our selves, as active manipulators of space, adapting to where and how we inhabit the earth, that have sustained civilizations until now. This understanding offers a framework for the agency that we have in our

FIG 1 Wildfire research at a national scale and as a local Austin-area stressor, paired with a shelter proposal. Credit: UTSOA Students – Alexis Carreon, David Juan Garcia, Katharine Glasheen; Instructor: Matt Fajkus.

FIG 2 Drought research at a national scale and as a local Austin-area stressor, paired with a shelter proposal. Credit: UTSOA Students – Amaya Lucas, Aaron McMurry, Casey Rowden; Instructor: Matt Fajkus.

FIG 3 Heat research at a national scale and as a local Austin-area stressor, paired with a shelter proposal. Credit: UTSOA Students – Tzu-Lin Lin, Thomas Palmer, Michelle Powell; Instructor: Matt Fajkus.

FIG 4 Flood research at a national scale and as a local Austin-area stressor, paired with a shelter proposal. Credit: UTSOA Students – Diego Zubizarreta Otero, Meg Bunke, Ken Dineen; Instructor: Matt Fajkus. ability to design solutions to the fundamental threats before us, and simultaneously exposes the limits upon our current modes of living.

TEMPORALITY VS. PERMANENCE

Upon examining our relationship to nature, there are two common approaches: one that frames the relationship as amiable —  living with nature, and one that frames it as combative — living against nature. Architectural historian Mark Jarzombek’s book, A Global History of Architecture, offers the example of pre-colonial, Native American tribes who placed great emphasis on maintaining agility to relocate and migrate on a seasonal basis according to changing weather patterns.3 Their architectural architype, the tepee, was the sophisticated means by which they would literally transplant their communities in response to threats. This image is in stark contrast with Marc-Antoine Laugier’s 1753 concept of “The Primitive Hut,” which hypothesized on the origins of architecture and the anthropological relationship between humans and the environment. Laugier argues that ”man” desires shelter “so that neither the sun nor rain can penetrate therein.” 4 This presupposes a more critical relationship described by Jarzombek that dates back further to the first civilizations where shelter, in the modern sense, as a permanent structure, was not necessary, due to milder climates and more agile societies. It was not until humans began to settle in extreme climatic regions that real threats of climate became elements to combat. This notion presents a shift in the anthropological values from nomadic civilization to colonial civilization, which placed greater emphasis on establishing permanence. This shift inevitably led to occupation around the globe in climates that are more-or-less desirable while the evolution of society introduced new priorities, power structures, and threats specific to both time and place due to this new relationship between humans and nature.

COMFORT/CONVENIENCE/RISK

There is a great contradiction in how we understand comfort and convenience when defining success in the built environment today. With the advancements in building technology, attitudes toward climate and place have become inverted. Fast-forward to the twentieth century from the pre-colonial Native American tribes, and one finds a very different

There is a great contradiction in how we understand comfort and convenience when defining success in the built environment today.

FIG 5 Resilience hub proposal responding to heat stressor, North-Central Austin. Credit: UTSOA Student Matthias Tippe; Instructor: Matt Fajkus.

FIG 6 Resilience hub proposal responding to drought stressor, Southeast Austin. Credit: UTSOA Student Cameron Osborn; Instructor: Matt Fajkus.

FIG 7 Resilience hub proposal responding to drought stressor, Southeast Austin. Credit: UTSOA Student Aaron McMurry; Instructor: Matt Fajkus.

way of occupying the same land. The ability to remain in place is currently emphasized in our society, and our response to climate has developed into a reliance on technology. Climate is something we literally control with advancements such as heating, ventilation, and air conditioning, which allows one to maintain a temperature range from sixty to seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit year-round. The reality is that this comfort is an illusion of convenience. In fact, it places us in constant conflict with nature, one in which we ultimately always lose. Mechanical equipment breaks, façades wear and lose integrity, expansion and contraction compromises structures, and infrastructure becomes inadequate to meet demand. The cost of comfort takes on more than just the energy cost associated with operating buildings, but also the time, money, and waste involved in keeping buildings operating. Ultimately, our desire to occupy a specific place in a particular climate — because of its beauty, resources, or our own emotional ties to it — can mask undesirable realities, providing a false sense of permanence that is actually a gamble against nature. We become tied up in probabilities, finding excuses to believe that threats such as fire, famine, flood, or drought won’t happen and are too rare to trade our temporary comfort and convenience to make a real effort to prepare, adapt, and evolve to get to the root of these threats. Furthermore, insurance, our current betting system against these threats, cannot provide possible answers to the risk our cities, communities, and families face. The tangible nature of these threats becomes more evident as their very real consequences begin to expose the fragility of our current modes of living. Cities below sea level are flooding and /or sinking; communities established in forests are subject to fires; families are losing their livelihoods with longer periods of drought. Examples such as these open the conversation to speculate on the built environment’s response to the consequences and constraints associated across different scales.

RESEARCH AND DESIGN RESPONSE AT THE UT AUSTIN SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE

Research and design offer the opportunity to experiment with strategies to interact with the uncertainty of the future. Mitigating the potential risks of the future can aid in the creation of shock-resistant, healthy, adaptable, and regenerative communities — creating resilient design through diversity, foresight, and experimentation. This method was directly applied at the UTSOA through a series of design studios taught by Matt Fajkus, in collaboration with Marc Coudert of the City of Austin Office of Sustainability. Student projects took on the relationship between urban resiliency, communities, and structures by investigating social, environmental, and economic stressors that face each context, proposing design ideas to help mitigate the disparity. The studio work investigated ways that a space can serve the needs of the community for both chronic and acute stressors, creating a flexible structure ready to adapt to changing needs, reintroducing a sense of agility from lessons of past civilizations. The City of Austin Office of Sustainability has

identified four major local stressors — wildfire, flood, heat, and drought — that threaten vulnerable communities and are expected to be exacerbated by climate change.

The studio prompted graduate architecture students to research each local stressor as a global phenomenon and then design a singular prototypical shelter, or a take on a “primitive hut,” to respond to each respective stressor Figs 1–4. The work then progressed to grounding the exploration within the local context of greater Austin. In conjunction with the four environmental stressors, the City’s Office of Sustainability identified social stressors, including mental-health issues, lack of adequate transportation, age, certain types of poverty, physical / mental disabilities, chronic disease, and race/ethnicity. These factors led to pinpointing particularly vulnerable areas of Austin, including Colony Park / Hornsby Bend (wildfire), East-Central Austin (flood), Southeast Austin (drought), and NorthCentral Austin (heat). The program prompt was to design resilience-hubs to be directly proposed in each respective part of the city, with both reactive and proactive program components. Resilience-hub design proposals were expected to be symbolic and functional nodes in their given neighborhood and meant to respond directly to the most relevant stressor. Each hub’s reactive program included housing, residency, and shelter for temporary emergency times; and a proactive program including research, education, and a community asset or public amenity for daily use Figs 5–8.

Through the design and relationship of each program component, the hubs not only addressed a specific stressor but also anticipated and mitigated the risks of a future shock. The hub designs proposed synergistic and integrated relationships to their sites, in addition to considering the immediate contexts and demographics. The UTSOA-student work has since resulted in a resolution to create resilience-hubs in Austin, and was addressed as an agenda item at the City Council meeting in March of 2021.

CONCLUSION

Polarization can lead to paralysis and insufficient action, or even inaction; all the while, time is always moving. Thus, finding opportunities for middle ground is of great importance in order to be able to evolve and adapt, for the inability to act will only intensify the very real threats around us in the built environment. While history has much to teach us, we must acknowledge the different circumstances we face, and the fact that solutions from past civilizations are likely not applicable today. However, the lessons are clear, and there is value in acknowledging the parallels between past sustainability responses to advance our own responses. Our fixated lifestyle defined by cities and infrastructure requires rigorous speculation on evolving our relationship to place, comfort, and risk to address the constant threats of climate. As a globally connected civilization intrinsically tied through history and future, design offers us a lens through which to imagine and test that imminent future. The aforementioned UTSOA studio work addresses such issues as building performance and response to environmental conditions. The proposed resilience-hubs explore ways in which architecture and design can operate in middle grounds between the global and local, urban and natural conditions, as well as between infrastructural and cultural situations.

FIG 8 Resilience hub proposal responding to drought stressor, Southeast Austin. Credit: UTSOA Students Jessica Felicelli and Fernando Olmedo Rivera; Instructor: Matt Fajkus. A Global History of Architecture 3 Mark Jarzombek, Franics Ching, Vikramaditya Prakash, (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2010). , 1753. 4 Marc-Antione Laugier, Essay on Architecture

1 City of Austin Office of Sustainability: https://www.austintexas.gov/department/sustainability. 2 https://www.austintexas.gov/department/city-council/2021/20210325-reg.htm#064.