Air quality crisis in New York City triggered by massive smoke plumes drifting south from Canadian wildfires, NYT K.K. Rebecca Lai and Jon Huang June 9, 2023

ARC3016YF (L0102) 
Instructor: Craig Douglas

Atmospheric Encounters and the Breathing Commons

We do not see the whorls, eddies, and twists of air, nor the continual forming, reforming, and collapsing of atmospheric surfaces. We do not perceive the invisible gradients of heat, humidity, particulate matter, pressure, scent, and biological exchange that continually move through the city. Yet we inhabit these conditions before we see them. We encounter the city first through respiration. Once perceived, the city reveals itself not as a collection of objects upon the ground but as a living atmospheric field through which worlds are continually remade.

City of Air proposes a different model of design. Air is reconceptualised as continuously circulating through bodies, buildings, landscapes, infrastructures, and climates. The studio positions air as the primary medium through which cities are produced and experienced. Design shifts from composing objects to working with atmospheric fields.

Working in Greece’s mythical capital Athens, one of Europe's foremost laboratories for climate adaptation, students will investigate how architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design can work with the invisible qualities of air. Through initiatives including the Cooling Havens, the Redefining the City, Resilience Strategy 2030, and the Mega Resilience Triple Green Development Project, Athens demonstrates how landscape and architecture reshape the thermal, ecological, and social performance of the city. Focusing on the Ampelokipoi district, where the relocation of the Panathinaikos Stadium presents an unprecedented opportunity to rethink landscape, housing, public space, and climate adaptation, students will engage one of Europe's most ambitious experiments in climate-responsive urbanism. Here, climate adaptation is understood as one of the defining design questions of our time.

This studio asks students to invent a new category of civic infrastructure, an infrastructure of atmosphere. Through new forms of architecture, landscape, and urban intervention, students will design public amenities of air. Students will investigate how architecture and landscape can work with atmospheric fields to cultivate new forms of civic life.

Drawing, model making, sensing, film, simulation, and AI-assisted analysis are employed not simply as techniques of representation but as technologies of perception that extend our capacity to observe, analyse, and engage the dynamic processes through which urban environments continually emerge. Working across the interconnected scales of the body, building, neighbourhood, city, and atmosphere, students will develop new methods for exploring design.

If atmosphere is the primary medium of design, then design becomes the choreography of atmospheric exchange across space, time, and material. City of Air proposes a future for architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design founded upon respiration rather than vision, exchange rather than object, and fields rather than sites. It imagines cities in which atmosphere is recognised as essential civic infrastructure, and where designers work with dynamic environmental fields to cultivate the conditions within which cities breathe.