| Number: | 011 |
| Year: | 2021 |
| Name: | Climate Architectures |
| Location: | Salton Sea, CA |
| Type: | Design Research |
| Project Team: | Gillian Shaffer, Ruchi Singhania, Chinmayi Suri, Florian Lepinard |
Climate Architectures addresses the urgent intersection of public health, climate change, and economic decline in one of California’s most vulnerable regions. In collaboration with climate scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and UC San Diego, this project imagines a research and educational center adjacent to an existing field site. The proposed research and educational facility at the Salton Sea is conceived as an architectural instrument that makes climate change visible. Its defining feature is a permeable membrane that filters airborne dust from the shrinking lakebed, creating a stratigraphy on the building’s surface that records environmental change over time, much like layers of rock. This dynamic façade transforms the structure into both a protective enclosure and a didactic tool, embodying the region’s evolving climate conditions. Organized to accommodate scientific research, educational programming, and community engagement, the building is designed as a hybrid space where architecture operates simultaneously as shelter, laboratory, and climate register.
