WORL WAR E
“Responding to the urgency of the IPCC report on Climate Change, the project proposes the definition of a new contextual condition - World War E. In interpreting continued emissions as amounting to acts of global warfare, World War E legitimizes a new set of operational rules.”
Ryan Cook, 2019.
SYNOPSIS
Responding to the 2018 IPCC report on Climate Change, the project proposes the definition of a new contextual condition - World War E. Through maps, advertising, cartography, colour, architecture, history, video, animation, typography, text, data, fashion, policy and current affairs - the project composes an illustration of a very real place, in a very near state of unrest. With historic and contemporary precedent pointing to the militarisation of crisis, the project for World War E is a personal attempt to understand a person, politics and planet in a state of ecological decline and the role an architect can assume in it’s milieu.
The formation of a new institution - the Environmental Defence Agency - is proposed as a merger between the ecological expertise of existing environmental bodies and the logistical capabilities of the Ministry of Defence estate. Interrogating the role of heritage and preservation, in a situation calling for deep adaptation, the project identifies the country house and its adjoining estate, as a historic and contemporary agent in the shaping of our national territory. Through a series of land change strategies - the project proposes for heritage designations to play a key role in future carbon sequestration scenarios. In the loopholes of a Post-EU, Post Common Agricultural Policy Britain, an opportunity exists within the tension between public and private land ownership, to establish more extensive, efficient and diverse landscapes and habitats.
With notions of national identity so entrenched in landscape and territory, the action of the Environmental Defence Agency aims to contribute towards a newly reformed and ecologically concerned citizen - dramatically transforming the idyll of the British rural landscape within the timescales of both the short and long term. In defining the physical spaces of warfare - as the territorial space of exception, the physical target and the logistical uniform - the project raises questions of the role individual democratic concessions play within periods of rapid and total change.
RYAN COOK
Ryan Cook is a London based architectural designer. In 2020 he co-founded CHANNEL, a design practice initiating responsive architecture in times of ecological breakdown. Through the process of building and representation, the projects explore the role architecture has in changing and upholding lifestyles, habits and environments.
Ryan has previous experience with David Chipperfield Architects, working on significant cultural projects such as the refurbishment of the Royal Academy of Arts, London and the extension to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. He holds a BSc in Architecture from the University of Bath and an AAdiploma with commendation from the Architectural Association, where he continues his involvement through workshops and tutorials.