Elise Misao Hunchuck | Air

Architectures of Nature: 2020 Lecture Series

The Slovak National Uprising square in Bratislava has hosted countless protests as well as entertainment events in the past. In 2013, Slovak artist Ilona Németh has covered the square in a thick fog, which brought an unprecedented change to the atmosphere of the square – both literally, in the physical sense, and metaphorically, in the psychological sense. After all, the change of a climate also acquires a double meaning in our contemporary situation – it can refer to the change of the collective ideological or mental setting as well as to the geophysical drama of our planet. The open question is how to understand these atmospheric changes as consequences of either intentional or accidental interventions, in the realm of design and architecture, among other. How does architecture modulate temperature, the mood, the ambiance, the very politics of the atmosphere? Does it have the capacity to touch upon the most ephemeral of the elements of natural architecture, the air?

In this conversation, we will be joined by Elise Misao Hunchuck, currently a studio tutor at ADS7 studio at Royal College of Art in London. She will explain us her approach to the interrelations between architecture and the atmosphere, as well as the approach of her colleagues and students. The proposals coming from ADS7 studio manifest a bold understanding of the current situation, making us believe that there is really “something in the air” – namely the change of the atmosphere in the practice of designing the built environment.

Elise Misao Hunchuck is a Berlin-based researcher, editor, and educator trained in landscape architecture, philosophy and geography. Her transdisciplinary research practice—with sites in Canada, Japan, China, Europe, Russia and Ukraine—employs cartographic, photographic and text-based methods to document, explore, and archive co-constitutive relationships between the materials, resources, infrastructures, natural processes, humans and more-than-humans. She is a senior researcher and teaching fellow at The Bartlett School of Architecture (London), a studio tutor at the RCA (London), a lecturer at University of Toronto, and an editorial board member for Scapegoat journal.

Zoom Meeting
https://cesnet.zoom.us/j/97657945084
Meeting ID: 976 5794 5084