The Austere

Conceived in 2018, The Austere originated as a design-build proposal for the U.S. Solar Decathlon before being reformulated as a speculative project. The work imagines a future shaped by accelerating climate catastrophe and water scarcity, where corporations step in to provide housing through prefabricated shelters tied directly to food production and labor contracts. Exhibited as a large-format presentation board and later adapted as an augmented reality installation, the project won First Prize (Student Choice) at Critical Mass that year, positioning it between architectural proposal, narrative fiction, and propaganda artifact.

The reading of the work reflects the moment of its making. At the time, speculative design culture often produced exaggerated extremes as a form of safe estrangement, using implausibility to open critical distance. The Austere inverted this conceit: instead of hyperbole, it grounded itself in the plausible, reframing an extreme condition—collapse of water systems, corporate housing provision, labor serfdom—not as outlandish but as an almost logical extension of existing trends. The effect was unsettling: the imagery, from homestead-style prefabs to Wyeth-inspired fields, rendered austerity not futuristic but imminent.

Looking back from 2025, the project reads as tied to the optimism and anxieties of its context. At that moment, the gig economy and corporate urban visions—Katerra, WeWork, Sidewalk Labs—were still seen as possible bulwarks against systemic collapse. The Austere took those trajectories to their limit, presenting them as survival infrastructure. In hindsight, as many of those corporate futures have faltered and private equity’s financialization of existing housing has become the dominant threat, the project stands less as prediction and more as a record of how speculative design can mirror its moment: exaggerating some dangers while making others visible in ways that, only later, prove prescient.