2010 SOM Prize for Architecture, Design, and Urban Design
Adventures in the Vernacular: Investigative Observations of Residential Climate Mediation

You could say that my SOM Foundation journey began twenty years ago, when I discovered that drying mud pies on the roof of my playhouse happened a lot faster if I propped them up toward the sun, shifted them at lunch, and then again in the afternoon before taking them down in the evening. Since then, I’ve been on the search for understanding of the process, the moment of innovation brought by necessity, and the poetry of building things—a trajectory of inquiry that landed me in architecture, and of course, most recently, on an epic five-month journey around the world.

Research, it seems to me, is a sort of trajectory, or more precisely, a meander with a purpose. “Trajectory” implies a known path, those dreaded equations from physics class that provide an explanation, but for me, merely cloud the issue I understand in pictures and observation and instinct.

It is with this mix of planned path and discovered trajectories that I set out on my SOM Foundation travels, along the 103° E, 75° W lines of longitude. The use of the longitudinal line is obviously, and unapologetically, arbitrary. But the link between these sites is not: each presents a rich heritage of colonizing cultures—from the British in Jamaica or Australia to the Russians in Mongolia and the Chinese in Vietnam. All of these places have a large stock of extant vernacular architecture, as well—ideal places to investigate my essential questions:

What happens when people from one climate arrive in another one and begin to adjust their architecture? What do they keep of their own architectural traditions? What do they sacrifice to a desire for climatic comfort? How do they learn from the architecture they encounter? How is this learning manifest in the built environment, at every scale? Most simply: What is the tipping point between climate and culture, as evidenced in the vernacular built environment?

These questions, and their attendant investigations, frame space making in every culture and at every scale—and seem to be the questions some designers have forgotten how to ask, because, perhaps, of a false sense of mastery over these questions. We think we are above these questions, that we can afford to talk about form before [or in place of] site and climate responsiveness, and our architecture suffers because of it. Whether siting a building according to the sun’s position in the cosmos or in relation to a good shade tree, vernacular builders’ sensitivity to, and nuanced interaction with, these considerations of climate and place yield fascinating variations on familiar types, as well as robust urban forms. Combine that with overlays of various cultural building traditions, and the answers to those questions become even more interesting.

I recognize that this particular body of work is not scientific research; it is not provable—the task of understanding each of these cultures, their architecture, and their historical and climatic contexts, is immense—for which the satisfactory completion of ONE of these sites would be a life’s work. Instead, I am presenting a method of inquiry, a process of interpreting the world, of drawing conclusions, connections, and comparisons that is, perhaps, unique to an architect—not fully quantitative, not fully qualitative—but firm in the belief that the graph and the painting, the data set and the sketch, the researched argument and the instinctual suspicion together create a rich lens through which to see, and begin to understand the world, and then carefully, boldly, to add to it.

I feel that, after nearly two years of working on this, I am just now figuring out what the questions are, how these issues should be framed, and how I want to investigate them. These investigations broaden as much as they refine and narrow my thinking. In some ways, I don’t feel really any different than I did as a first-year architecture student, or as an eight-year-old making mud pies. For me, it’s all part and parcel of a way of living in the world, a way of engaging, and grappling, with curiosity—that, like Newton, we might sometimes swing our legs out of bed, only to become paralyzed by questions and thoughts for hours; but that the architect in us, the builder, the maker, would put pencil to paper and find movement again.

Epilogue

The research I’ve begun here is really just a start, just a way to begin to frame the questions and issues I want to tackle. I plan on continuing this work in both its manifestations—qualitative, in paintings, drawings, and writing, and quantitative, by building climate analysis models of the basic typologies I found (ger, shophouse, Malay house, Jamaican board house, Australian wood house, etc.) to see if the climatic claims and my field observations are actually true. This work has already become in an integral part of my teaching, practice, and design sensibilities and priorities, and my hope is to continue to disseminate the research—both its results and the methodology I developed—in all aspects of my professional life.

As I’ve reflected on my research questions and as I wrestled [both in the field and after I returned] with how to represent and synthesize the piles of visual information and data I gathered, I began to work out a way of graphic representation—grounded in work I started in my master’s thesis and grounded on the belief in the value of hand work as a hybrid with, and companion to, digital work. These drawings represent, in the process of them, a distillation of my research proclivities and preoccupations. Some are observational, some are grounded in data collection, some are measured drawings. Most are hybrids, using a field sketch as inspiration for a more developed drawing I executed months after I returned from the field, and with the comprehensive picture of the whole trip, the intellectual connections, the instinctual comparisons, on my mind. Ultimately, it’s this combination of the quantitative and qualitative that I find so compelling and find a particularly perfect home for architects.

Many people told me this trip would change my life, and of course, they were right. I imagine what my friends in Mongolia are up to, the beginning of the morning bustle in muggy Hanoi, the preparations for scaling mountains, going to sea, riding horses, selling goods, having a night on the town, for making a meal. I can hear the snuffles of llamas, the call of muezzins, laughter, singing of hymns, folk songs, and anthems, shuffling feet on stone or sand, the voices of hundreds of people in dozens of languages. I can smell fresh ceviche, desert air, countless markets, wool blankets, the insides of cathedrals, houses, and jeeps. I can close my eyes and be a million places, a world away from my desk under the skylight or from my rattling underground T commute.

To claim an understanding, or even a slight grasp, of all that I encountered and saw and experienced would be small-minded indeed, and counter to the essential paradox of learning: that learning more, and seeing more, actually means understanding less, as the hubris of finding answers dissolves in the face of complexity, richness, and wide-eyed wonder.

Fellow Experience

Marilyn Moedinger visited SOM’s Chicago office on August 2, 2012 to talk about her travels. Moedinger drew a longitude line around the globe that passed through her hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania to establish her itinerary. She sat down with SOM Chicago Communications Manager Edward Keegan to discuss some of her experiences.

You grew up in a house that’s been in your family for three hundred years. How have you developed this incredible interest in traveling to atypical locales?

It starts with feeling grounded spatially in a place and feeling like you have roots. I want to explore what makes other people feel grounded where they are, to seek out that same feeling in other people, and to feel the necessary fearlessness or recklessness you need in order to go to crazy places. When I was preparing my itinerary, I thought it would be a cop-out if I didn’t put some crazy places on there. I started with the line of longitude in my hometown and continued it around the globe without any judgment about where it landed. It went through Mongolia—so alright, that’s on the list.

How were you traveling?

My original proposal involved traveling by train everywhere, but obviously I flew to China and then took the train to Mongolia. In Mongolia, I had crazy modes of transportation—from camel cart to the back of Jeeps. I rode a horse across the desert. The part of traveling that I love is getting from point A to point B. I took the train overnight down the coast of Vietnam because I wanted to know how big this place is and the only way to do it is to take the train. If you fly, you have no sense of the space. It’s a spatial understanding, so I avoid flying whenever I can. I drove in Australia—on the other side of the street. It’s part of the adventure.

What was most memorable?

Mongolia. It was the wildest place, the place I knew the least about, and the only country in the world that doesn’t have a McDonald’s. It’s such a different world and yet it didn’t feel so different in some ways. I saw Mongolian residents setting up solar panels outside their gers (tents).

What are they using the solar panels for?

They might have a TV they run for an hour a day, or they might have one lamp they run at night, or they’ll charge their cell phones. Odds and ends, but not the things we might use it for. They have to be mobile, so you’re not going to have things like fridges and stoves and stuff like that. They use it for sort of incidental things. Cell phones are important in order to find each other across the desert.

What was the length of time from when you started until you finished traveling and how much time was collating and writing and designing the book?

I found out in July of 2010. I was teaching at Northeastern, so I traveled during winter and spring break. My first trip was December 2010 to January 2011 when I went to Switzerland. In March, I was in Peru. Then I was in Jamaica, then my hometown, and then the Asian countries starting the end of May and I got back September 3, 2011. I started work on the book three weeks after I got back but I ended up experiencing some pretty severe reverse culture shock, so I needed a little bit of a break. I finished the rough draft in the beginning of February 2012 and completed it in April. I started lecturing—at University of Virginia, then in my office, one at Harvard, and now here [at SOM Chicago]. I guess I’m done now.

Which of the cultures you explored are closest to you in terms of your own living?

You become the pivot point of all these experiences—the people in Mongolia don’t know how the people in Peru are living, but I know how both of them are living. And being that sort of pivot point around all the things, there are certain things that I do or don’t do now because of who I met and what I experienced. It changes how you look at the whole world because if you hear about a disaster halfway around the world, it doesn’t feel like halfway around the world anymore because you might have been there, or you can picture how people are living or eating dinner and something happens. I don’t know if I can point to a specific thing, just more of a broadening consciousness.

What do you do next?

I can’t pull my professional trajectory away from my personal trajectory. I want to continue research, I want to teach, and I want to practice. I see them as mutually beneficial to each other in interesting ways. It’s important to me that this is not self-serving. This trip was not about me expanding my horizons and being a better architect. It’s about what I need to do for the profession and for the world. By experiencing all these different things, now I can give it back in a much more meaningful way than I could have if I hadn’t done the traveling. These things will all enter into the kind of practice that needs to be happening.