The Five Thousand Pound Life design study
February 26, 2018
As an organization that creates an arena for the growth and sharing of ideas in architecture and urbanism, The Architectural League of New York will call upon designers to harness their creative and technical ability to understand how things are, then project how they might be instead. We will achieve this through a design study that imagines the lives of Americans that are both aspirational and sustainable – drastically reducing carbon emissions while rejecting austerity and reductionism as the dominant strategies for compliance. Through The Five Thousand Pound Life, project teams will cultivate transformative ideas that grapple with the challenges we face in the broad categories of our material lives – energy, land, food, mobility, and water – shaping them into integrated visions and strategies for progress.
The purpose of the study will be to inform and engage public discussion, helping the United States move toward an environmentally and economically viable future. The study will create vivid scenarios of what an American life, lived within a carbon budget of five thousand pounds (annually, per person, on average), might look like in six different regions of the United States circa 2050.
The League is looking forward to announcing more information about this project in Summer 2018.