1st Semester Studio Project | 2021
Design an environmental research outpost designed to observe a weather event expected to increase in occurrence and severity due to climate change.
ACTS OF CLIMATE
A firestorm is strange in its nature: it is born out of a catastrophic weather event and gives birth to a second catastrophic weather events with the potential to perpetuate the first weather event. Under the correct environmental conditions, a wildfire can generate parcels of warm air that rise rapidly into the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere, generating a pyrocumulonimbus cloud, or pyroCb. Here, the second weather event, a thunderstorm, takes shape, and when lightning strikes dry wood it causes another wildfire, repeating the destructive cycle.
Since the details of how this weather event develops are still not fully understood by scientists, it is necessary to compile all available information and present it in a concise, yet still legible, way, through the creation of two-dimensional and three-dimensional representations of the seemingly amorphous, abstract parcels of air as they transform into thunderclouds.
then cools, densifies, and gathers dust particles as it becomes a pyroCb.
CLIMATIC ACTS
In order to repel the effects of a firestorm, one needs to be able to both protect themselves from the ferocious heat and flames and also needs to be able to easily flee from the scene. Therefore, insulation and articulation are pivotal considerations for a body-sited device designed to protect a person from a firestorm. Constant material experimentation in both material and form resulted in a sleeve designed for the elbow. Siting the device on the elbow would emphasize both the articulative quality (since the elbow itself articulates) and the insulative qualities (since the thin skin located in the inner part of the elbow has little insulation) of the device. The device employs multiple folds to enhance its structural rigidity while also increasing the surface area and thus the insulative quality of the device, while its voluminous form allows a large amount of air to mediate between the surface of the device and the wearer’s skin, activating air as a second insulative medium. The device is designed as separate modules to enable easier articulation and to provide a tight fit on the arm, which aids in insulation by preventing the slightest bit of firestorm-generated hot air from entering the device.
CLIMATE ACTION
An environmental research institute, by nature of its program, requires that it not only insulates itself from the firestorm as the body-sited model does but that it controls and monitors the rising air just enough to be able to observe it without damaging the building or its occupants. The concept of insulation remains, while the concept of articulation becomes the means by which the research outpost observes and records data about the atmospheric conditions prior to and during a firestorm.
Forest Cloak utilizes a system of wooden trusses and plastic fins that drape over a concrete edifice and over the surrounding landscape in what appears to be a single line that follows the contours of the landscape.
The wooden trusses raise V-shaped plastic fins, which are hinged on metal rods and are designed to rotate with the wind and record information about the atmosphere’s movement. Air enters between the fins and the edifice; this not only serves to add an insulative air layer to the building as in the body-sited device but enables it to record information about the air as it rises from underneath it en route to forming a pyroCb.
The most intense firestorm to date, known as the Pacific Northwest Event,occurred in the Okanagan, located in southern British Columbia Canada, in 2017. The particular site is expected to change Koppen climate zones three times, with the earliest change coming in 2025, followed by changes in 2055 and 2087. The dry season, when firestorms are most likely, is expected to lengthen. Siting an environmental research outpost at theOkanagan is therefore advantageous due to the many insights it currentlygives and will give about firestorms.
During the summer months in the Okanagan, the wind tends to blow from the west; Forest Cloak is therefore sited facing the west in order to record as many different instances of wind as possible in order to understand what happens in the atmosphere before and during a firestorm. It is also sited where there is consistent sun exposure year-round so that Forest Cloak can observe the atmosphere as it undergoes motions due to the convection currents brought about by the sun’s heat.
