AD EXchange with 2021 McDermott & Kolb Berglund Traveling Fellow Belen Vigil

Rescheduled from June 8

Biography of Human Adaptations to Climate Change Through the Lens of Architecture

The role of the architect is not only to design and construct the built environment, but to also study and understand the environmental, societal, and spatiotemporal impacts of our actions from local to global scales. The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the global average but specifically, it is the southwest area of Greenland where the most changes are taking place in the region. For thousands of years, the Inuit, an Arctic Indigenous Peoples, have mastered resiliency to live and thrive in a harsh tundra environment and, currently, are adapting their lifestyles to a series of historical changes.

Greenland’s architectural response serves as a foreshadowing to a rapidly changing climate, public policies, and a vanishing thousand-year-old culture, and offers a unique platform to document and collect data. Belen’s travels focused on alternative ways of understanding place and her research presents strategies for addressing future fragile or at-risk ecologies.

Join us Wednesday, July 13 for our virtual AD EXchange to hear from 2021 McDermott & Kolb Berglund Traveling Fellow Belen Vigil. Following her presentation, Architecture and Design Foundation Scholarship Chair Clemente Jaquez, AIA will moderate a Q&A. We invite you to join the conversation.