Crunch design research

In less than 150 years, our carbon society transformed planet earth. Today more than 50% of ecologies in the world are determined by unsustainable industrialisation processes. The latest United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports showing that we are quickly arriving at points of no return in the warming of our planet. For example, Greater Miami and the Islands is one of the most climate-vulnerable zones. We cannot afford to continue in the same direction; we need new ideas and solutions. In the coming decades, the low-lying areas of Miami are set to be swallowed by sea-level rise combined with increased yearly threats of hurricanes, king tides, tropical storm surges, bay contaminations, coral bleaching and heatwaves. Not far away from Miami, the strongest Hurricane named Dorian on record hit the Bahamas, wreaking massive devastation on the islands and loss of life with maximum sustained winds of 297 km/h. The storm surge topped 7 meters above normal tide levels in September 2019. For Miami 2,5 to 3 meters of sea-level rise by 2100 is possible and catastrophic with storm surges up to 7 to 10 meters. Inundations of this magnitude would physically displace some 800.000 to 1.000.000 residents of Miami-Dade County. A large portion of the urban settlements will be uninhabitable if decision-makers continue building as usual. Besides, most of the infrastructure in Miami is over 80 years old. Out of control runoffs, contaminants and thousands of leaking septic tanks pollute and spill yearly millions of gallons sewage into the bay. On top of all of this, the porous limestone rocks its residents live and work on every day means. There is no stopping sea-level rise, changing ocean currents, storm surges and the intrusion of saltwater and contaminants into the Drinkwater aquifers.
Under the three year umbrella of CRUNCH (Climate Resilient Urban Nexus CHoices), and the Food-Water-Energy (FWE) Nexus research, this Third Volume looks at designing adaptive, resilient, biology-inspired, and carbon-positive green-blue infrastructures and buildings, self-growing coastal barrier islands on a timeline from 2019 to 2100. These systems and structures act as dynamic selfpowered hybrids that are floating, sitting in, out, or under the water with the ability to be completely self-sufficient, all benchmarked against 100% carbon-neutrality and the FWE nexus. All research designs are based on approximately 80-year scenarios in which modelling by NOAA, NASA, and reinsurance companies placed much of the low-lying areas underwater. The studies include design studio strategies from studio professors Thomas Spiegelhalter and Alfredo Andia, Claudia Busch and Claudio Salazar to identif future climate change impacted sites, disruptive building technologies and systems with dynamically changing cultural identities. This includes anticipating future adaptation potentials, and mitigate the aforementioned environmental issues through the lens of ongoing transformations in the geo-specific social, cultural, and ecological context of Miami Beach and the City of South Miami between now and 2100.

Thomas Spiegelhalter is a professor and a co-director of the Structures and Environmental Technologies Laboratory in the School of Architecture at Florida International University (FIU) in Miami. As a registered architect, engineer and town planner, Thomas has performed design and built research in Europe, the Americas, Asia, Africa, and the U.S. on numerous solar, carbon-positive, zerofossil-energy architectural projects; large-scale master planning and post-industrial infrastructures, landscapes, and engineered suspension bridges. As a result of his 30 years of awarded designs and built work, consulting, research and teaching, Spiegelhalter has received 54 prizes, awards, and honours in competitions individually and in collaboration with engineers, biologists and landscape architects. His research work as a Professor at FIU involves geospatial and climatic data repositories with AI-ML data-driven generative design workflows and coding with biomimetics. The current FIU CRUNCH research (http://crunch.fiu.edu/) is focused on optimized green-blue infrastructures and shorelines, self-growing islands and structures, building and city designs and fitness tests towards carbon-positive resilience on a timeline from 2020 to 2100.