Bridging past + future: Used immersive tech (projection mapping, 3D printing, Cinema4D) to make abstract climate data tangible; showing how a house's relationship to climate changes from the Devonian era to the year 2110.

Tools: 3D printing, projection mapping, MadMapper, Cinema4D, Fusion, historical research, climate data analysis

(Scroll through media vertically)

The first video in my thesis media gallery is the current physical state of the project. It contains a 3D printed house, with visuals projected on it using a projector and a 3D digital model of the same house. The images on the front of the house are historical images hinting at the history of the location of the house, with an audio recording of people doing things in a modern day house. The following images show the progression of development, from research to early prototypes. My thesis is currently in progress. See the full concept summary of my thesis below.

Thesis concept summary:

Everything has an origin point in time. Every person was born somewhere, every tree fell to the ground as a seed on a particular day, and every what’s-now-a-city had some being’s eyes fall on it for the first time before choosing to come back a second. Sometimes a person born, a tree sprouted, and land seen into a city all cross paths and become something to each other: a home and an inhabitant. The origin point of this relationship is trickier to pinpoint; how many times does one have to return to a place before they call it home? How many transformations does a landscape have to go through before it can have an inhabitant? What happens once the two actually come together? My thesis, 2110, explores these relationships starting from the beginning of recorded history through 85 years into the future, ending in 2110.

Millions and millions of years ago, the Devonian age began to form a landscape we sit on today. It covered the land of the midwest in a shallow, warm, sea that was filled with strange fish, sea worms, and tiny, shelled, creatures that were left behind embedded in stone as evidence of the occurrence and close of the age. As the Devonian age moved out, it left space for glaciers to form from its frozen waters that sit on top of the tiny skeletons it left behind. Eventually, the glaciers began to melt and carved the land into hills, rivers, and basins, depositing sand and stilt. Loess hill and fertile soil emerged from the ice. Exposed rock bluffs, silurian dolomite, and the bones and shells of the small sea creatures remained to show us the story of the land recorded in stone.

Many years later, the first known human civilization found its way to eastern Iowa: the Ioway tribe. After many more years, the Sauk and Mesquakie tribes were driven to the area by the French as they entered what is now known as America. Life at this time went from woodland culture characterized by hunting, to an agricultural culture. The area was eventually colonized by Europeans, starting with a priest named Father Marquette, who led expeditions to explore Iowa and attempt to convert the existing communities to Catholicism. This brought in a wave of pioneer farmers who illegally squatted on the land, claiming it as their own.

The settlers brought their concepts of ownership with them; they formed claim associations to project settlers “rights,” and officially placed bids on the land for the lowest price. Because of their organization, they were prepared to defend their claims with violence, leading no one to bid against them.

From the settlers, we can fast forward to what has now become Iowa City.

Some of the earliest maps of urban development and analysis available come from insurance companies. One example of this is the Sanborn Fire Maps, which were created to help insurance companies assess liabilities in urbanized areas, depicting complex diagrams of information and layouts that characterize buildings in a particular area. This set the groundwork for modern residences and urbanization as we know it today.

After geological eras, climate changes, civilizations, priests and colonization, squatting, development, and insurance companies, a ranch style house was built in Iowa City, Iowa. It is called 2110 Blue Lawn Road and it stands today as a result of everything that happened before it, performing as an emblem of the modern relationship between home and inhabitant. It represents time, change, ownership, independence, family, stability, success, and the result of the politics that allow it to exist as it does.

My thesis project, titled 2110, explores the meaning that stands behind this house, as well as what lies ahead of it: the relationships between climate, home, and time. Through a combination of a physical mini-model, climate data, a digital predictive model, and a projector, 2110 aims not only to predict, but also visualize, our changing relationship with the idea of home as it relates to the physical place and the conceptual. 2110 is an attempt to understand and speculate on how climate change will affect the built structure of our homes across several climate futures, and challenge the viewer to consider how the safety in the idea of “home” is changing through the perspective of one home through time.

A house as a structure has long been an emblem of security. It fulfills one of our most basic needs: shelter. A house has, for a long time, been a symbol of a future–of an American dream–something that marks success, happiness, and safety. However, at the same time recent generations have been working toward the long-time goal of owning a home, scientists have simultaneously been warning the world that the ground beneath our homes is changing. The air around our homes is getting warmer, colder, drier, wetter, windier, and stormier. So what happens to our home, once we finally get it? What will homes look like when the world around them is unpredictable?

2110 aims to provide a speculative answer to these questions by looking at the data, and visualizing it in the physical world. To explore what the past and future of homes looks like, I would like to take existing climate data and create a predictive model, experimenting with both machine learning predictive models and old school, mathematical models. I plan to use publicly available data like daily weather, humidity, wind, sun, and storm tracking to create a prediction of what weather could look like in Iowa City as the climate changes over various scenarios. I would like to apply this model to one specific material that is used to build houses, probably wood, meaning that this will partly be a predictive life-cycle analysis of treated and painted wood. This part of the project will be digital. 2110 also includes research into the origin point of 2110 Blue Lawn Road, going back from the earliest understandings of the landscape to the present form of the land as a home.

The current version of the project includes a 3D printed version of a digital 3D model of the house. I have used projection to colorize and animate the house, as well as to experiment with how I want to visually display the history of land and house. As I complete the project, I will CNC a slightly larger version of the house in wood, and project the final version of my produced media on the physical house model. This media will display past, present, and future versions of “home” in this location, with the visuals designed based on historical research, the present condition of the home that exists there today, with the future visual depicting speculative scenarios stemming from data analysis and existing research on climate predictions.

The social and political findings of this research will be displayed as artifacts inside the digital version of the house, navigable as a digital museum.

See the next project for the beginning of the data exploration and predictive model that will invorm the speculative future.

See the PDF attached for the latest work update and next steps.

design & engineering portfolio