Vessels of Change: Exploring Nature inspired flexibility in Architecture to address Climate Migrations

Abstract

Climate change is one of the largest global threats today. Pakistan is highly vulnerable to suffer from its impacts such as climate migrations caused by flooding. It is the movement of people from or to the site due to sudden change of circumstances. Due to these migrations existing architecture undergoes a transition and must be rethought with the incorporation of uncertainty. The 2022 flood caused two major forms of climate migrations: movement of residents towards the external periphery of flooded zones and movement of relief teams towards the periphery. The disaster was to be immediately dealt with by the Disaster Management authorities however such operations could not be executed effectively as a result of lack of flexibility displayed by the existing architecture towards this new requirement for increased storage, working units, residential units for displaced residents etc. To battle against the uncertainty of natural disasters, principles of flexibility were developed from nature itself: Flexibility mechanisms in spider webs were studied, creating spaces that housed the management authorities, supported the residents and systematically integrated the incoming backup teams. National Disaster management authorities, humanitarian organisations and flood victims were interviewed to form a basic framework of requirements for disaster management. Simultaneously, the web patterns and mechanisms that best suited the operations of such an institute were iterated and refined to develop a form of additive architecture. It featured natural interconnected network structures, diversity or redundancy and capacity to adapt or organise. The expected outcome is a facility that is not only able to house the incoming relief teams to disaster zones in Nowshera but also will temporarily support residents within its flexible modules. The institute will be able to make provisions for future extensions of permanent structures and flexible temporary modules through a pure underlying growth principle. This pure addition principle will generate advantages in respect to production cost and fabrication time of extension modules especially in states of emergency.