The Yak and the machine

The Yak and the Machine is an architectural world-building project that speculates on humanity's relationship with architecture and the environment. Architecture's current situation boasts large-scale construction to the benefit of corporations and governments at the expense of people, as exemplified by the fourth-world conditions seen in American post-industrial cities throughout the Midwest. This, in addition to increasing climatic variability, embodies a dystopian condition of slow decay. Rooted in a questioning of architecture's origins, the project proposes a revitalized definition of architecture and its methods of representation. It suggests architecture is a primordial result of life expressed through craft and making. To best represent architectural objects, they must be seen within their physical and emotional context. For this reason, a story acts as a way of representing architecture. The pursuit of understanding craft through participation identifies with the story's morals and results in architectural outputs. Together, this architecture suggests a paradigm shift in humans' relationship to habitat under the pressures of climatic chaos and social stratification.