Extremeness-Defined Design - Takaharu Igarashi

RESEARCH
ARCHITECTURAL PLANNING | BUILDING PRODUCTION | BUILT ENVIRONMENT
Yashiro Lab | Department of Architecture | The University of Tokyo

Through unforeseeable natural disasters and long-term climate change, all of humanity’s current living environments could potentially transform into harsh environments where it is difficult for human beings to live. To overcome this vulnerability, it is essential to develop technologies for constructing built systems in places where the conditions are hostile to human activity. This work aims to systematize the concept of extreme environments and develop a theoretical foundation for constructing built systems in extreme environments.
The work defined an extreme environment as one that poses difficulties to human habitation and devised criteria for evaluating the extremeness of an environment, taking into consideration not only natural and geographical aspects but also social and economic factors. An analysis framework is formulated for comparing the built systems in extreme environments that differ substantially in their surroundings, purposes, functions, and scales.

LIMITED HABITABILITY ON EARTH | The 30-min mesh population density heatmap tells us how human habitation is limited to a small portion of the surface of this planet. All the black regions in this map are inhabitable — *extreme environments* for humans. Population data from CIESIN (2017).

ENVIRONMENTAL EXTREMENESS | The matrix classifies various environments according to their (physical) intolerability — the level of physical protection required for a person to survive — and resource inavailability — difficulty in accessing resources to support human well-being.

SCOPE OF BUILT SYSTEMS IN EXTREME ENVIRONMENTS | This is a graphical representation of the scopes — crew capacity, duration of stay, physical scale, and physical duration — of 18 examples of built systems in extreme environments

SYSTEM SCOPE vs. ENVIRONMENTAL EXTREMENESS

SYSTEM SCOPE vs. PHYSICAL PHASE OF THE ENVIRONMENT

SYSTEM SCOPE vs. TEMPERATURE & PRECIPITATION

SYSTEM SCOPE vs. GRAVITY & RADIATION LEVELS

SCOPE, ENVIRONMENTAL CONDITIONS & SPECIFIC REQUIREMENTS | The extreme environmental factors function as constraints on the system design, calling for specific requirements and considerations.

Related Publications

Igarashi, T. and Yashiro, T. (Aug 2019) “Construction in extreme environment: Definition of extremeness and parameter analysis of case projects,” Sustainable Built Environment Conference 2019 (SBE19), Tokyo.
Igarashi, T. (Mar 2019) “Construction of built environments in extreme environments (An introductory study on the dynamics of environments) [Japanese] (極限環境におけるbuilt environment の構築に関する研究：環境の動態に関する研究序説),” Master’s thesis, Department of Architecture, the University of Tokyo.

HEADER IMAGES | Pexels.com