WAY BEYOND BIGNESS

AUTHOR: DEREK HOEFERLIN

Provides a uniquely contemporary design-research framework for multi-disciplinary strategies across multiple scales of river basins.

As architects, it is our responsibility to appreciate, to speculate, and to collaborate regarding the possibilities of how the engagement with water ultimately impacts, and potentially prioritizes, our design decisions. These global fundamentals must reinstate an understanding of the complicated built environments we and all other species share. These are ones we cannot continue to dominate with hardline and static interventions, but rather ones we should begin to design with adaptive and dynamic negotiations. To do so, architects must become better aware of architecture’s trans-scalar relationships—spatially, temporally, and geopolitically. This is not just for architecture’s sake, but also, and more importantly, for architecture’s multi-scaled integration with landscape architecture, engineering, infrastructure, urbanism, policy, economy, ecology, law, hydrology, public health, etc.; and ultimately, the larger distribution context of watersheds that all designs inhabit. In other words, the inevitable, and hopefully smarter, next step in the dynamic networking of human manipulated built environments.

“Way Beyond Bigness” prioritizes two approaches:

1. The understanding of the larger-scale effects of “watersheds” for design decisions. More specifically, how can designing with water and infrastructure integrate best with the built environment?

2. The inevitable, yet resilient, need to adapt to contemporary, tipping-point “watershed” events in time.

“Way Beyond Bigness” proposes a simple, adaptive framework that utilizes an integrative design-research methodology, structured in three parts:

Appreciate + Analyze [A+A]
Speculate + Synthesize [S+S]
Collaborate + Catalyze [C+C]

Woven throughout the three parts, “Way Beyond Bigness” attempts to realign watersheds and architecture across multiple:

Scales (sites to river basins)
Disciplines (ecologists to economists)
Narratives (hyperboles to pragmatics)
Venues (academics to professionals)

ENDORSEMENTS

"'Way Beyond Bigness' is a guidebook to those things—territories, systems, networks, infrastructures—that are so vast that they sit at the edge of comprehension where they flicker in and out of understanding. Derek Hoeferlin and a cohort of contributors and collaborators cut through the abstraction of river watersheds with analytical precision, producing cross sections through text, drawing, and making that reveal difficult histories of ecology, engineering, colonization, and control. And yet the book is also a personal reflection on the muddy sediment of place and the agency of architecture at scale."
—Mimi Zeiger, critic and curator 

"The complex challenges that we face today and the way that they impact communities across the globe require a shift in the way we think and work. Collaborative, dynamic, and interdisciplinary approaches at multiple scales are key to envisioning alternative spatial possibilities and equitable futures. Derek Hoeferlin’s work uses the ecological system of the watershed as a way to explore the evolving relationship between the built environment and its myriad of communities. The remarkable research, analysis, and drawings of three global watersheds included in this book help us understand the scale and impact of the human manipulated environments we have created. It challenges us to think about adaptive

ways to better integrate water, infrastructure, and communities. Ultimately, this crucial body of work provides readers a tool to understand how water can be a transformative factor."    
—Iker Gil, Director of MAS Studio and founder of MAS Context

"Why aren’t there more books like this in architecture? In a field preoccupied with self-mythology and the pursuit of real political and economic power, books that actually question and consider how architecture might shift its gaze from one’s own navel to the broader world are few and far between. If the era of architects dedicating their lives to creating bespoke, beautiful objects for luxury clients under obscene working conditions is finally dying, then the new world imagined by the field’s radical fringes is still struggling to be born. 'Way Beyond Bigness' breaks from this tradition in the best possible ways. How and where designers fit amidst the flotsam of a dying planet is perhaps the single most important existential question facing the built environment professions this century. Derek Hoeferlin challenges us to think about the practice of architecture, the production of planetary urbanism, and the larger forces that shape each of us in new, productive ways."
—Billy Fleming, Wilks Family Director of the Ian L. McHarg Center at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design

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