Architecture of The Bayanihan: Speculative Design In The Pacific Typhoon Belt

Abstract

The Philippines is at the brunt of today’s climate wrath, with typhoon winds reaching 300 km per hour. These storms create real-life dystopian scenarios, with people from informal communities especially vulnerable to displacement, homelessness, poverty, and dispersal cycles. In the Anthropocene, the category of the “Internally Displaced Person” thus becomes ever more vital as it reorganizes conventions of time, space, and culture through weather events. This thesis asks how architecture can help mitigate the experience of recurring typhoons by rethinking the safety and cultural practices of communities and coastal dwellers in Tacloban, Philippines. The project reinforces Bayanihan—a tradition of communal unity—by adapting ideas of mobility to changing climates and displacement cycles it produces in Barangay 37. As a speculative mobile architecture that plugs into a “safe zone”, the project proposes a new cycle of retreat, reprogramming, and return whose links to cultural traditions undo the devastating paradigm of displacement.