We are a responsive collective who can learn from the past, but occasionally forget to.

There are physical, material, as well as cultural implications of not adapting architecture to an adapting planet. Whether some believe that the number of natural disasters are steady, increasing, or decreasing, the fact remains that it is not uncommon for modern construction to stray from a sensitivity to context (physical and intangible, permanent and temporal), resulting in an architecture that is unprepared and incompetent against nature. Additionally, a notion persists that man and nature relate as contradicting figures, that this is a ‘versus’ interaction. There is a developing logic that seeks not for a cure-all technological fix, but rather for a more collaborative, symbiotic approach to how modern construction can be designed smarter, more cost-efficient and aware. For example, a series of inhabitable structures can become snow fences to prevent avalanches, they can be designed for maximal implementation of passive systems in environments, however mundane or extreme, and they can certainly provide for optimal survival circumstances.

Combining innovative tactics with an existing knowledge base (modern and vernacular) concerning the relationship between humans and extreme weather, architecture can serve as a collaboration between the two, in order to prevent a scenario in which people ultimately lose resources, homes and lives, and work towards changing the phrase ‘natural disasters’ to ‘natural occurrences.’ The idea of home can be reconstructed in this context as a widely common small construction, one that is an inherent necessity of daily life.

This is a serious proposal with a sense of optimism, a communicated lightness that does not subtract from its pragmatic intention. Not to be viewed as a mission to save the world from itself, or as a proposal heralding on the shoulders of sustainability, this design proposal acts as an elevated peace of mind for house and home, and an enhancement to its surroundings.