CLIMATE REFUGEE HOUSING

UCLA Research Studio
Fall, 2020 - Spring 2021
Location: Fargo, Sioux Falls, + Winnipeg
Prof. Heather Roberge + Partner Sam Radice

As the forces of climate change begin to fundamentally change the way we inhabit our planet, causing in the most extreme cases some regions to become wholly unrecognizable and more devastatingly, uninhabitable, this project acts as a means to not only acknowledge and give credence to such a scenario but to use this moment as an opportunity to fundamentally understand the nature of migration and resettlement, to reexamine aspects of the typical American landscape, and explore how the built environment both has and could form it.

At the core of our objective is a passion to create a building system that foregrounds the needs of uprooted peoples by assessing the pitfalls of current institutions of migration while anticipating needs, wants, and desires so as to facilitate the growth of highly cosmopolitan, sustainable communities embedded within new and foreign regions. As such, a few aspects lie at the core of the creation of our building system — a need for a sense of community, a preservation of cultural identity, an understanding of family that transcends the nuclear unit, and a deep embedment of agency which we contend comes in the form of adaptability, flexibility, and economic opportunity.

Situated within a semi-rural context, one highly typical of large swaths of the United States, our broader aim is to reexamine infrastructural propensities within such regions and offer an alternative mode of habitation that draws from foundationally agrarian surroundings and spatial individuality while exploring an alternative to the typical single family home and introducing a means of density we argue to be at the core of building cultural sustainability and reinforcing a sense of community. As such, our project juxtaposes urban and rural, individual and collective, static and variable and situates the inhabitant at the core of every decision.

CLIMATE REFUGEE HOUSING

Morgan Jacobs