Diverse Interactions
University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, School of Architecture
Featured Beneficial Microbial Exposures in the Built Environment to Promote Health View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Gwynne Mhuireach
Increasing incidence of inflammatory diseases has been correlated with Western and urbanized lifestyles, which tend to have decreased access to outdoor nature, especially in lower income and marginalized communities. However, since humans evolved for millennia in the presence of environmental microbes associated with living vegetation, soil, and water, our immune systems are not only adapted to coexist with the majority of these microbes, but may even require that interaction to function properly. Evidence increasingly suggests that exposure to environmental microbiota, such as those associated with soil, may be important for establishment of normal gut flora and healthy immune system development. As a single gram of soil can contain billions of microbes, some of which may have immune-promoting qualities, integrating healthy living soil into urban built environments could provide large-scale public health benefits. Using next-generation DNA sequencing technology, we explored how soils in the built environment can contribute to human microbial exposures. Specific cases include backyard and community garden soil and earthen plaster as an interior finish material. Prioritizing equitable and accessible garden spaces in urban neighborhoods and using sustainable earthen materials in residential construction could augment urban-dwellers' interaction with soils and their microbiota, thereby fostering healthy immune development.
Architecture Back to Square One: Design with Earth, Wind and Sun
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Myoung Joo Chun
Building design and construction have become assimilated all over the world thanks(?) to global transportation of materials and building system technology since the 19th century. The convenience of standardized design and construction has created environmental costs of transportation and pollution. It has been increasing carbon footprint with energy consumption for heating or/and cooling and construction waste while in the construction and afterlife because buildings have been heavily relying on extracting earth’s resources and leave bigger and bigger impacts such as the greenhouse effect, energy crisis, and climate change. This crisis is beyond the tipping point now. The study seeks wisdom in vernacular historic architectural design and local construction methods with locally sourced materials without consuming resources. Interior Architecture graduate students investigate the sustainable design and construction method for an off-grid rural Senegal area and reflect on the applicability to replace the contemporary standardized design and construction.
Controlled Environments on the Rise: Pineapples, Buildings, and the Origins of 'Artificial Climates’ in Architectural Discourse
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Foivos Geralis
The integration of mechanical environmental systems for regulating the climate played a significant role in the development of modern architecture, but also resulted in an epistemological rupture that gave rise to a new typology of environment/space.This paper investigates the origins and evolution of environmental control systems in agricultural experimentation, specifically pineapple cultivation and horticulture, in the 18th and early nineteenth centuries in Britain. The advanced thermal requirements required for pineapple cultivation propelled the advancement of cultural techniques from the portable heaters used in orangeries, with their uneven thermal distribution, to the development of an exterior mechanical system creating a homogeneous thermal environment, an artificial climate, within the vegetal house. Experimentation in hothouses for growing pineapples in the nineteenth century led to the normalization of exposure to a new stable homogeneous environment, which provided a solution to the conflict between the interior and exterior, and gave rise to the concept of a 'artificial climate' to describe a third paradigm of space/environment: an interior space designed as an exterior brought from somewhere else. The concept of 'artificial climate' was accompanied by the belief that any climate in the world, specifically that of Jamaica, a typical locus for British colonial ambitions, could be better imitated and reproduced in hothouses.The study interrogates whether climate theory and climatic control arose from a desire to mimic a specialized spatial climate of a specific region, rather than an ideal "universal" model of abstract type, and how this architectural history informs our understanding of contemporary environmental discourse.
