Project by Chris Martin Smith
These three projects (2 chosen by AgwA, one by me) are organized around the understanding that architecture participates in living systems whose boundaries exceed the building itself. Wind patterns, flowering cycles, runoff, soil conditions, migration routes, maintenance regimes, ritual gatherings, and material afterlives all shape the spaces humans occupy. Architecture as interdependence, therefore, only can coexist by first unfolding and understanding the relations already present on a site.
The work presented examines how architecture can operate within these conditions through attention to atmosphere, species, infrastructure, and time. Each project is grounded in a specific geography and develops from the agencies already active there. In Guancora, El Salvador, a community gathering place is renewed through planting systems tied to seasonal bloom cycles, local timber structures, shade, and ceremonial paths that allow memory to be carried through seasonal growth and collective use. In Montana, a house is shaped by prevailing winds, snow drift, and creek hydrology, where domestic life is understood as part of larger climatic and watershed cycles. In Brussels, an obsolete office block is transformed into an urban habitat where work, dwelling, birds, pollinators, planted systems, and water reuse are brought into new forms of coexistence.
The projects share an interest in environmental forces that are often treated as background conditions. Wind becomes a spatial organizer. Snow accumulation becomes seasonal insulation and water storage. Plant succession becomes a calendar of return. Openings in a façade become nesting cavities, pollinator chambers, ventilation inlets, and light wells. Water is not simply supplied and drained, but slowed, stored, filtered, and returned. In each case, architecture is understood as a medium through which multiple forms of life and matter meet.
This approach also requires attention to scale. Large ecological questions are often encountered through modest assemblies: a timber post set under an existing roof naturally oxidizes and decays - it will need community attention, care and maintenance, a swale cut to redirect runoff, a bird cavity set within precast opening, a terrace planted for shade and pollination, a roof of “"snow fence”“ angled to catch drifting snow.
These precarious details requiring care are where those architectural systems of relation become most legible and inhabitable. They are, I argue, where we can find solutions in this strange world of immense love, alongside economic and ecological ruin.
