2025 Researcher-in-Residence
A Permeable Atlas

Architecture has long positioned itself as a machine for dryness. It builds walls, seals joints, layers membranes, and erects barriers, all in an effort to keep water out—to deny its inevitable return. Yet water has never adhered to these divisions. It seeps, condenses, erodes, accumulates, and evaporates, shifting states and boundaries as it moves through materials, bodies, landscapes, and infrastructures. It is both the element that sustains life and the force that threatens it. It disappears when needed and overflows when least expected. The contradiction is not in water itself but in how architecture insists on controlling it. Water, however, does not obey architecture.

Water as a Political and Material Agent

This project asks: What if, instead of resisting water, architecture made space for its movements? What if leaks, rather than being failures, were seen as opportunities to reimagine how bodies, buildings, and landscapes negotiate the flows that sustain and disrupt them?

The relationship with water on the island of Lanzarote in the Canary Islands offers an alternative to the modern obsession with dryness. In this volcanic, arid landscape, water is not an abundant resource to be extracted but a dispersed presence that must be gathered, slowed, and absorbed. Walls are not barriers but instruments of collection, channeling condensation from the air. Cratered fields catch rain before it disappears into the porous ground. Underground cisterns hold onto moisture, storing it for the moment when it is needed most. Here, architecture does not separate itself from hydrological cycles but actively participates in them, forming a network of relations between air, stone, soil, and bodies.

This stands in stark contrast to contemporary cities, where water is either privatized, extracted, or expelled; where floodwaters are treated as a threat rather than a resource; where drought exposes the failures of infrastructures designed only for excess. To learn from Lanzarote is not to romanticize pre-modern techniques, but to recognize that water security is not simply a matter of quantity—it is a matter of distribution, of governance, of material and spatial strategies that account for its movements rather than seek to dominate them.

Intervention: A Permeable Atlas

Rather than seeking a single resolution, this project engages in a research-based material and spatial study that makes visible the hidden circulations of water within architecture. The outcome will be A Permeable Atlas—a collection of drawings, maps, and prototypes documenting how water moves through buildings, landscapes, and bodies. This atlas will trace the relationships between historical water-harvesting techniques, contemporary infrastructural failures, and speculative architectural responses that embrace rather than resist water’s agency. It will serve as both a research archive and a design toolkit, offering strategies for working with seepage, condensation, and controlled dissolution as design tools rather than failures.

Public Talk: “Leaks, Flows, and the Politics of Wetness”

At the culmination of the residency, I propose a public talk and a panel discussion to present the research, framing leakage, permeability, and water’s agency in architecture as central concerns in a time of climatic uncertainty. The discussion will bring together experts in water governance, climate adaptation, architecture, and the arts to examine how material, political, and environmental infrastructures intersect. The conversation will explore how design can move beyond impermeability toward new strategies of resilience, adaptation, and coexistence with water.

Leaking as Resistance, Leaking as Adaptation

To leak is to refuse the illusion of autonomy. It is to acknowledge that buildings, like bodies, are dependent on larger systems of circulation, on forces beyond their control, on infrastructures that determine where water flows and who has access to it. If modern architecture has sought to erase these dependencies, to construct itself as a closed system, then this project insists on their visibility.

As climate change accelerates, bringing more extreme cycles of flood and drought, the persistence of the sealed, dry building becomes more than an aesthetic or material concern—it becomes an ecological and political failure. To rethink architecture’s relationship to water is to rethink its relationship to survival. The infrastructures that once managed water are no longer sufficient, and yet new infrastructures remain uncertain. Perhaps the solution is not another attempt at control but a willingness to design for instability—to acknowledge that the boundaries between bodies, buildings, and landscapes are already leaking.

The question, then, is not whether architecture can prevent leaks. It is whether it can learn from them, design with them, inhabit their uncertainty rather than fear their arrival. If the 20th century was an era of sealed envelopes and controlled climates, the 21st demands another model: one of exchange, of exposure, of buildings that sweat, seep, and absorb. In a world where water will only become more unpredictable, architecture must become more porous—not as an act of surrender, but as an act of adaptation, of care, of survival.