(Un)Seen and (Un)Desirable – Architecture and the Products of Nature Part 2 Dissertation 2022 Sum Yee Yung University of Hong Kong | China Architecture is often regarded as a passive object under the influence of nature. Weathering, deterioration, decay… All these terms, when brought up in the discourse of architectural sustainability, pertain to the negative impacts of the forces of nature enacting upon buildings.Since the first recorded human shelter some 400,000 years ago, to the 19th century post- industrial ideas of longevity in architecture proposed by John Ruskin, “architects” have been designing against the force of nature – and understandably so, for it is human nature to desire for a safe and robust shelter that can last forever.However, contemporary and post-modernist architecture has begun its shift away from this human desire by reinterpreting our building’s relationship with not only the desirable aspects of nature, but also the undesirable, unseen, undiscovered parts of it – subnature. Thus, can we design for nature rather than combating it? Can we bring forth these unseen forces of nature that play a sly role on our health? Can we flip this narrative around and design for “functional deterioration”? Tutor(s) Cole Roskam