A thesis installation following one house across geological time, urban development, and an uncertain climate future.
about this work
The house at 2110 Blue Lawn Road was built in the American midwest in the mid-twentieth century. Its story runs long in both directions. This project traces it backward, through 400 million years of geology, Indigenous land stewardship, colonial settlement, and the federal housing policy that made the American suburb possible and exclusionary. Then it follows the house forward, to the year 2110, using climate modeling to ask what it will take for this structure to remain a home.
The work is organized as three rooms. The Past Room holds archival text, audio, and ecological footage moving backward through deep time. The Present Room is a portrait of the house today, set against the insurance crisis working through the American property market. The Future Room is where a climate model runs live, projecting conditions at this address out to the end of the century.
the problem
Most climate risk assessments operate at the scale of cities, counties, or regions. The projections stay abstract. This project asks the same questions at the scale of a single address: one structure, aging under conditions it was not built to handle.
methods
The model draws on ERA5 reanalysis data (1940 to present), CMIP6 ensemble outputs from three high-resolution models (EC-Earth3P-HR, MPI-ESM1-2-XR, MRI-AGCM3-2-S), and IPCC AR6 delta scaling under SSP2-4.5, the emissions scenario most commonly used in near-term adaptation planning. A physics-based degradation framework translates those projections into property-specific maintenance cost trajectories and structural vulnerability estimates for this house.
applications
The methodology applies to insurance underwriting, real estate due diligence, and adaptive building management. Anywhere that climate risk needs to be understood at the scale of a structure rather than a region.
Thesis · Parsons School of Design, 2026
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