Comfort Levels

The final pair of presentations from the Architecture League Prize’s Uncomfortable series treated the audience to a playful, animate vision of architecture as facilitator of empathy, love, and “second lives.” For Katie MacDonald and Kyle Schumann of After Architecture, technology can breathe new life into materials considered waste by-products or at end-of-life; for instance, in one project felled diseased tree trunks became tessellated interlocking tile walls and roofs. For Joseph Altshuler and Zach Morrison of Could be Design, elements of walls, floors, and roofs become colorful anthropomorphic assemblies. According to Altshuler, these “creatures,” though remaining within the architectural, “form connections between people and build relationships between biotic and abiotic beings.” Connecting the two addresses was a hopeful, buoyant disposition toward the uncomfortable crises of our times.