“I will tie the glass and stone with string, hang the shards above my bed, so that they will flash in the dark and tell the story of Katrina, the mother that swept into the Gulf and slaughtered. Her chariot was a storm so great and black the Greeks would say it was harnessed to dragons. She left us a dark Gulf and salt burned land. Katrina is the mother we will remember until the next mother with large, merciless hands, committed to blood, comes.” 

— Jesmyn Ward, Salvage the Bones 

Climate shapes the architecture of the South, direct and unforgiving. Heat and humidity shape buildings, often becoming hurricanes severe enough to reshape entire communities. Southerners are accustomed to abandonment and decay, disappearing landmarks, the threat of cataclysmic change. 

Living and working along the fragile coastal edge, we reckon with the climate and how it changes by day, season, and amid the current epoch-shattering spiral of consumption. We acknowledge a future marked by more frequent and more severe events. Where others see the strangulation of regulation, we find opportunity; where communities flirt with uncertainty, we delve in with curiosity and delight. We have survived the flood, the loss, the grief across an incomprehensible territory. There is hope: light after a storm glows with promise, memories after a death more vivid, attachment after isolation more fierce. 

Architects create the future, a future that can be more resilient, more just, more sustainable. We must not continue to reconstruct the tropes of the past in a place where familiar icons were built by the labor of the enslaved. Instead, we design to acknowledge the changing climate, benefit the whole community, and adapt to the future with grace.