Large City Architecture Research

Fourteen million nine hundred and eight thousand eight hundred and fifty-six acres of forest: that is what it would take to sink the carbon Austin emits through its built environment, and if everyone lived in an urban fabric like Austin, three and a half forested planets would be needed to absorb how we build, place and comfort our homes. One household in West Austin alone emits 80 tons of CO2 a year, the highest amount in the world; living in the most desirable city of the United States is also today’s most unsustainable way to live. The exhibition set this arithmetic against twelve years of research from five institutions, Die Angewandte Vienna, the University of Innsbruck, the Bartlett School of Architecture, The University of Texas at Austin and lab-eds, and asked what an architecture larger than wholes, one that builds with parts, has to say to it.

The climate crisis unfolds only at planetary scale, yet it is fired by each person’s way to dwell. The exhibition text drew the consequence: with no hinterland left, the world has to be included in the city now, and buildings no longer frame and contain but bind, blend, bond, brace, clamp, fuse, interlock, stitch and interweave. Partaking in worlds turns cities into forests of participatory capacities, buildings into trees and people into birds.

Daniel Koehler and Rasa Navasaityte curated the show as research by architecture: not by words, not by numbers, but by models. Dozens of them, small and white, stood on a scaffold of cardboard beams and columns that filled the Mebane Gallery from floor to ceiling: one moved through the room as through a large building of parts, the models on its floors, a dense printed wall of drawings behind them, the arched windows of the gallery at its back. The acknowledgements listed every participant in the order in which they had joined, from Gil Greis and Maric Sanel to the Bartlett teams of 2017 to 2019.

Large City Architecture Research was on view at the UT Austin School of Architecture from 19 January to 15 April 2022, supported by a grant of the university’s Office of the Vice President for Research. It followed two earlier showings of the work, in Rise of the Familiar + Soft Discrete Familiars at the Fort Worth Community Arts Center in October 2019 and in Thinking Parts: When Numbers Dwell at Die Bäckerei in Innsbruck in March 2020, interrupted by the lockdown, and it shares its subtitle with the chapter Large City Architecture / Research by Architecture that Koehler and Navasaityte published in Positions: Unfolding Architectural Endeavors (Birkhäuser, 2020).