Architecture for Unstable Environments

Wearing your air: An Architecture for Unstable Environments
Anderson, B., Diniz, N., & 2013

Once invisible, pollution has rendered air visible through the emission of gases and particles from factories, coal-fired plants, car-exhaust fumes, homes, jets and more. Pollution roams with the atmospheric turbulence that circles the earth. This natural turbulence–beautiful vortexes, eddy flows and emigrational currents–beocmes, then mixed with pollution, an unnatural enemy of human beings. Dramatic as this may sound, air is killing people. The choking of millions by lung and blood diseases from air pollution has reached endemic proportions on an unprecendented scale.

The article is divided into four parts, the first “The archaeology of air” explores the visibility of air. The second “The sociology of air” discusses the social interaction of air we share with others. The third part “The capital of air” accounts for air and industry, production and profit and, the last “Wearing your air” discusses the prototypes under development, the methodologies for wearable ‘urban architectures’ and their implementation in terms of hardware and software, sensing technologies, mapping, domains and user testing. The article concludes with a speculation on “The future of air” and the consequences of living in unstable environments. In particular, the article focuses on the pollution problems facing China today.

R. Armstrong, & S. Ferracina (Eds.), Unconventional Computing: Design methods for adaptive architecture (pp. 172-175).
Cambridge, Ontario: ACADIA and Riverside Architectural Press.