WHAT IS A CLIMATE EXCHANGE?

This is the question our studio centered around answering. Building off the precedent of the Chicago Stock Exchange - a new typology of its time - and its abstraction & commodification of grain into futures trading, we sought to interpret a built manifestation of the carbon credit economy into a ‘climate exchange’. It was up to each of us to define what program and purpose a climate exchange would entail. 

WHAT DOES THIS CLIMATE EXCHANGE DO?

This project centers around creating a circular economy for the clothing industry. In our modern consumer society, the clothing industry produces an excessive amount of waste and CO2 emissions. As fast fashion has spread across the globe, we see garments worn less and thrown out more. This institution aims to tackle these issues by using a carbon credit system to secure the future of the repair & re-use industry.

Corporations can purchase carbon credits through funding the building’s repair/re-use shops by calculating the amount of clothing put back into the consumer stream. This lowers the price of clothing repair, an industry currently suffering at the hands of cheap fast fashion alternatives. They can also fund the workshops and vocational training that teach repair skills. 

The ways in which form was approached in relation to textile was through various interventions in plan, site, and materiality. The site was “stitched together” with what was called Active Ground; a woven matrix of re-used materials to comprise the ground plane. The plan was approached as an open space subdivided by moveable, rotating panels that could re-form the seams of the spaces inside. The facade was similarly interwoven with re-used scrap material from demolished buildings. This logic even continued into the model-making process itself, with the scale model being made from scrap pieces of other student’s projects that would otherwise have gone to the landfill. Every formal move in the project was derived from its relation to material re-use and the textile industry.