The studio is interested in the role that a building (and landscape) can play in expressing the value a community places in its own collectivity and by extension, the value it places on shared resources and services, creating an architecture that elevates a sense of ownership and responsibility to their collective efforts.

This studio foregrounded architectural and landscape architectural approaches to passive systems that address a broad array of challenges brought on by the increased frequency of extreme weather events and shifting weather patterns while elevating the expression of the architecture as a collective community value. To explore these goals, the studio designed Resiliency Hubs for Benton Harbor, Michigan.

Resiliency Hubs are an emerging urban typology of community-serving facilities augmented to support residents, coordinate communication, distribute resources, and model sustainable building strategies to enhance quality of life. Resilience Hubs play an important role in everyday life providing education, preparedness training, recreation and access to resources, while contributing to the environmental health of the community. In times of disruption, they play a critical role as a haven providing emergency shelter, a base for communicating critical information, the continuity of power, freshwater food and health services. They also play a critical role in post- disruption recovery and ongoing communications needs. No two hubs are alike and serve a wide range of functions based on the community they serve, but at their most basic level they act as critical infrastructure ensuring continuity of energy, fresh water, food, health services and community.