Building Tomorrow: Reimagining Housing in Conditions of Climate Change

This course has limited capacity, reserve your spot now to secure your place!

Over the next several decades, climate change will become more extreme. To cope with changes in the environment, people will need to build differently. At the same time, the comforts of home will grow more important. Architecture will have to adapt to a new reality without becoming alienating.

Combining the sciences and the arts, this hands-on workshop explores future climates in terms of geographically-based climate analogs, helping you to reimagine home by learning from housing in places that currently have the climate you’re likely to encounter in the future. Over the course of three hours, you’ll discover how different architectural traditions contend with extreme weather. Using this knowledge, as well as simple materials such as cardboard and masking tape, you’ll develop creative ways in which to apply traditional ecological knowledge from elsewhere to make your home environment sustainable.

Course Logistics

Dates: Sunday, May 4, 2025

Times: 1–4PM PT

Location: Gray Area / Grand Theater
2665 Mission St, San Francisco, CA 94110

Cost: $75

Scholarship: We also offer Diversity Scholarships.
Apply by April 28, 2025.

Experience Level: Beginner

Requirements:
• No additional tools required

Additional Information:
• No refunds or exchanges
• View our FAQ here
• Contact [email protected] with any questions

Workshop Outline

Part I: Make a cardboard model of your home
Part II: Analyze climate conditions in your house or apartment
Part III: Learn about traditional housing in locations that currently have the climate you’ll experience in future decades
Part IV: Remodel your house or apartment based on passive climate control systems used in the traditional architecture of analogue locations
Part V: Share your reimagined home with fellow participants

Accessibility Update:
Please note that this workshop will be held in the upstairs Gray Area classroom, which is not ADA accessible. We apologize for any inconvenience and encourage those impacted to contact us for assistance. Thank you for your understanding.

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Educational Goals

Participants will learn about architectural adaptation for climate change, and about climate analogue modeling. Participation will inform ongoing research by the Consortium for Climate-Adapted Architectural Heritage, which is offering these workshops in locations ranging from Mexico City to Nagaland.

About Technologies

The workshop will build on climate analogue modeling techniques developed at the University of Maryland.

Instructor(s)

Jonathon Keats

Jonathon Keats is an experimental philosopher, artist, and writer whose transdisciplinary projects explore all aspects of society, adapting methods from the sciences and the humanities. He is the author of six books on subjects ranging from science and technology to art and design – most recently You Belong to the Universe: Buckminster Fuller and the Future, published by Oxford University Press – and is the author of a weekly online arts column for Forbes. He is a research associate at the University of Arizona’s College of Fine Arts, a visiting scholar at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Biofrontiers Institute and San José State University’s CADRE Laboratory for New Media, a fellow at the Berggruen Institute, a research fellow at the Highland Institute and the Long Now Foundation, principal philosopher at Earth Law Center, and an artist-in-residence at the SETI Institute and Biosphere 2. He co-directs the Consortium for Climate-Adapted Architectural Heritage at the Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics. A monograph about his artwork, Thought Experiments, was recently published by Hirmer Verlag. His newest book, A Field Guide to More-Than-Human Governance, is forthcoming from the Berggruen Press in 2025.