A white book with text on it that reads Thinking and Building on Shaky Ground on architecture in seismic regions by Yun Fu

Event

Thinking and Building on Shaky Ground

February 22, 2024
5:30 PM – 7:00 PM

1855 Broadway, 11th Floor Gallery and Online

The talk centers on the recently published book and the application of insights in design practice.

Thinking and Building on Shaky Ground is a book about designing for risk and resilience and can be read in three ways. First, the book argues that it is misguided for designers to think about earthquakes as purely technical problems. Working with 120 case studies across 30 countries, the book shows that designers have come up with different design options and strategies that combine technical knowledge with several kinds of cultural and social understandings.

Second, the book argues that the diversity of options and strategies for seismic architecture can be conceived in terms of six distinct schemas or ways of viewing the world. What is shareable between designers is not the repeated use of the same technical solutions but a sense of the schema.

Third, the book argues that the ability to recognize different kinds of design innovation will be key to navigating the new scales of risk and uncertainty in the Anthropocene era.

Learn more about the Future of Design lecture series.


Introduction and Moderation

Evan Shieh

Teaching Assistant Professor at New York Tech School of Architecture and Design

Yun Fu

Speaker

Yun Fu

Partner, Semester Studio, Design Critic in Urban Planning and Design, Harvard GSD

Yun Fu is a partner of Semester Studio and a Design Critic at Harvard GSD, where he co-authored the Master of Architecture in Urban Design core studio and offer courses on housing, cities, and urban design theory. Yun's scholarly work focuses on design thinking, or the method of solutions, surveying different approaches to familiar classes of problems. He is the author of several books, including Thinking and Building on Shaky Ground, Southeast Asian Modern: From Roots to Contemporary Turns, and Korean Modern: The Matter of Identity. Yun’s held the Rome Prize at the British School, the Sinclair Kennedy Travelling Fellowship, and was a Confucius Scholar at Peking University. His publication re-framing risk and resilience as a critical design problem was supported by the Graham Foundation. He received a doctoral degree from Harvard University, a MArch I AP from Harvard GSD with the AIA Henry Adams Medal, and a BAs from UNSW Sydney with the AIA Undergraduate Design Medal.

Request AIA Credit

Register