Designing for Climate Change

“In New York, we used to have snowstorms in the winter,” a MoMA security guard remarked this week. “Now, when they talk about snowstorms…it’s just not the same.” This sentiment isn’t unique to New York. In fact, UK-based climate scientist Ed Hawkins says something similar in this month’s episode of the Magazine Podcast. Hawkins’s work, which visualizes the globe’s warming temperatures over the last 160 years, is currently on view in Pirouette: Turning Points in Design. The visualizations are striking in more ways than one, showing us just how quickly and dramatically the environment has been changing.

But climate change is more than escalating temperatures. It has tangible effects on how people live, and architects like Marina Tabassum have been using design as a tool to address hazardous conditions like flooding and soil erosion. For this Earth Month edition of the Magazine Podcast, we’ll also hear from Tabassum about her collaboration with Bangladesh’s landless populations and her project Khudi Bari (tiny house), now on view in Gallery 216: Down to Earth.

Climate Scientist, Ed Hawkins: I certainly remember, as a child growing up in the UK, we had a lot more snow than we do recently. I remember several winters during my childhood where we would go out and build snowmen and have snowball fights, and I’ve just not had the chance to do that with my own children in the same way.

Host, Arlette Hernandez: Climate change isn’t always subtle. And it’s only becoming more dramatic and dangerous as the world continues to warm.

EH: I also remember a very intense heat wave in 2003 in Europe. That event was exceptionally hot and killed tens of thousands of people across Europe.

AH: You might be noticing these kinds of shifts in your own life, too. And while the circumstances can feel overwhelming, maybe there is something we can do about it.

Welcome to MoMA’s Magazine Podcast. My name is Arlette Hernandez, and in honor of Earth Day we’re exploring climate change through the eyes of two designers: climate scientist Ed Hawkins, whose data visualizations have fueled global conversations around the topic; and Marina Tabassum, an architect working with communities in Bangladesh to adapt and respond to environmental changes.

Together, they’ll show us that while climate change may be global, there are ways to respond at our local level.

AH: Encouraged by that success, Professor Hawkins looked for more ways to show climate change simply and clearly. Two years later, in 2018, he published the now-famous Warming Stripes visualization: an array of differently colored vertical lines ranging from shades of blue on the left-hand side to pale coral and deep crimson as we approach the right, where we’re now getting closer to present-day temperatures.

EH: A colleague of mine, Ellie Highwood, had knitted a blanket with stripes representing the temperature in that particular year.

About a year later, I was invited to talk at a literary festival in the UK with poet Nicola Davies, and we put on an event where we were talking about the science behind climate change, and Nicola was writing some beautiful poems about it as well.

We wanted a very simple way to talk about the changes to our climate in a way that the audience would understand. And I recalled the blanket that my colleague had knitted the year before, and designed a set of graphics with a different set of colors to represent the changes in temperature, moving through blues and reds to intuitively represent the changes in temperature.

I showed this at the literary festival and I could see the audience immediately—the penny dropped in their minds. They instantly understood what it represented and what it meant, and that made me realize the power of a very simple graphic to communicate these very important issues.

Lots of people have reported to me that when they first saw it, it stopped them scrolling through their social media feeds. It made them stop, ask questions about what these blue and red stripes represented, and so it sparked a natural conversation about what they mean and what we should do in response to it.

AH: One of the things that makes Hawkins’s visualizations so powerful is how easily they can be adapted to show climate change at a local level.

EH: We’ve created these graphics now for every country around the world, and also for many different locations and cities within many different countries. That enables people to talk about the changes where they happen to live, and I think that’s very important—that local connection, to highlight that, yes, the globe is warming, but that means our local community is also warming and changing.

MT: It’s a tiny house, but it’s more than that, actually. Khudi Bari is a structural module, and then if you add these modules together, it can turn into a really large structure. It could be one module. It could be a three-module house. It could be as many as you like.

There are two levels, so when there is flooding, you can always go up to the second level, and then you don’t need to leave your home. You can bring your belongings to the upper floor and then save yourself.

The idea was: how can we create something that would be sturdy and strong? But at the same time, will not be too deviated from the cultural construct of a home that already exists in our landscape. That was our major goal. And then, of course, movability, that people should be able to move with it.

AH: From the outset, Marina’s team wanted a home that was modular, culturally familiar, and easy to relocate—all at once. Every detail, especially the materials, had to reflect that vision. So they chose bamboo for the main frame and reinforced it with steel cross-bracing.

MT: It’s a vernacular intervention.

AH: Which, in architectural terms, means building with local resources in ways that respect cultural needs.

MT: Vernacular, to me, is actually a response to the local climate and local geography. It’s built by people with their own knowledge of construction, of that land.

There’s so many interesting wisdoms in building with climate, in a way, as a response to the climate. And I think those are such important wisdom that exist in the entire world. I think there’s so much to learn from that, because of the situation we are in now.

With all the technology that we have, we’ve actually not really taken much interest in it, because technology helps us to cool our buildings, or to heat our buildings. In a way, that created a lot of imbalance in the climate that we are facing today. So I feel like we need to really tap into those wisdoms and the knowledge that exists in the lands everywhere.

MT: Our houses cost, at this moment, about 450 US dollars—including transport and labor.

We wanted to reduce the cost, because the people for whom we are targeting this house actually are the ultra-low-income population in this world. They basically live off the land. So you have to give them something which is affordable for them.

AH: But affordable doesn’t mean poorly designed.

MT: Everybody has a right to good design. And just because we’re building a tiny house in a sandbed doesn’t mean that it needs to look anything like a shack or something. It needs to have that dignity of design. That was important.

Those questions do arise. Why do you want to help us? And we don’t help you, actually. We are here to build together. It’s always about collaboration. We’re not giving something for free. We want them to learn and to be a part of this whole system.

AH: So how have Tabassum and her team actually brought the Khudi Bari project to life?

MT: It’s always about building trust first, and that building trust takes time.

When we go to different communities, when we started building it, the first thing we did was…we have these brochures, we have images of what it will look like when you complete it. We do a lot of community activities also, and through the community activities, then the whole entire community decides on one particular family who’s probably, let’s say, in terms of income level, probably the lowest, or they have some sort of disability or they really desperately need a house.

So they choose one particular family to build the first house, and then the entire community takes part when we are building it also. So they understand how the construction works, how the whole mechanism works, how does the bamboo fit into the steel joints and everything. They actually directly gets involved in the construction process.

A free thing never has the same value as something that you have you’ve made yourself. That sense of ownership is very important, and that’s why it’s important for us to collaborate with people rather than give things away.

EH: Conversations are really important. We need to talk about climate change more than we do in our communities with our family and our friends and our colleagues, to talk about the risk we face, talk about the responses we’re all individually taking.

This is a global problem, which requires a global solution from everyone in society. It requires individuals to make different decisions about how they live their lives. It also requires companies and industries to make different decisions about how they operate. It also requires politicians to be brave enough to take the difficult decisions that will enable the changes and allow people to make different choices.

AH: And Tabassum’s approach to landlessness in Bangladesh is a powerful case study of exactly that.

MT: It was just a response to something. We felt a commitment, I think, me and the colleagues who work in this project. Commitment to the fact that, we live in a country where we have 90 percent of the people living beyond the level of subsistence, in many ways—who cannot afford an architect or even can dream of having an architect build their houses. That makes us kind of niche, in that sense. But we have that capacity to work with people in many ways where we both learn from each other, and make it much more sustained, much more rewarding for us also.

I must say that it wasn’t easy. There was so much pushback. For me, this was a learning curve.

I’m not claiming that this is the answer to our climate crisis. This is just an attempt. If it works, it works. If it doesn’t, we learn from it. Maybe we improvise it. We’ll do something more.