Hannah Wood

To explore the notion of ‘resilience’, in 2015 architect Katharina Manecke and I formed a nomadic studio and set off to travel the Silk Road over land from Georgia to Japan. To design for resilience is to confront some of the most imperative challenges of the twenty-first century: to embrace vulnerability—whether in the form of an epidemic, a financial crash or the impacts of a warming climate—through an ability to adapt to dynamic and rapidly shifting conditions. At key milestones, defined by moments where we understood resilience to be most at stake, we established and coordinated workshops to reflect on the role of the built environment in how communities can withstand, and adjust to, novel conditions.

The idea for the Silk Road project evolved out of an interdisciplinary discussion forum we initiated in 2014 in Dhaka, Bangladesh, which provided a platform for local voices to debate how the city was rapidly changing. This project similarly aimed to connect with people living in some of the world’s fastest growing regions, but remain critically underrepresented in mainstream architectural discourse. This ambition took us to fast-growing megacities, across deserts and steppes and to some of the world's most politically isolated regions. 

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Each of the workshops applied representation techniques inspired by the local surroundings, including collage-making in Tbilisi (Georgia); mapping mataskya in Almaty (Kazakhstan); exploring architectural memory at an academic forum in Chungju (South Korea); and a form-building workshop in Ishinomaki with elderly residents (Japan). All workshops addressed both local and global conditions and provided a forum for discussion and debate. Insights from the ‘Mapping Resilience on the Silk Road’ were presented in an exhibition in Copenhagen in December 2015.