We live in perpetual crisis, continually arising and concluding. Known as the term poly crisis, as coined by Edgar Morin in “Homeland Earth: A Manifesto for the New Millennium”, the perpetual overlap and unavoidability of crisis asks of us what might the clinic space, a place of treatment and care, do more? This project asks what a clinic might look like when integrated as part of daily life, entranced in routines and rituals, and localized in a system where crisis response occurs at the city, state, and national level. Elaine Scarry’s “Thinking in an Emergency” argues that in moments of crisis, democratic societies often suspend deliberation in favor of rapid action when in fact the negotiation process may be key to the response. This intervention into the clinic puts agency back into the community in a subversion of the information dissemination mechanism. By bringing the sources of health information to the local scale in a flexible, non hierarchical deliberation space, the voices of the community may be better consulted in the information that is disseminated in order to perform care before and during the event of the current crisis.

Cycling program on the ground floor becomes a social community space organized by the fellowship on the floor above, whose goal is to prepare, inform, and engage with community-level effects of the crisis. This will be a place of gathering, of sharing, of care, of spectacle, and of curiosity. One day the space will be a pop up store while the next week it’s an exhibition, and the next a blood drive. The rotation of the ground level facade contributes to the indeterminacy of this flexible space, a place for negotiation and understanding, its threshold continually in flux.

This space primarily functions as a cooling center, a typology that only has that specific use for a small portion of the year, as well as restrictions to primary use by elderly only. This project ingrains the cooling center with crisis response on the local community level, no longer keeping crisis response at the city oversight level but taking it into the community and maintaining this practice which people who live there, on site, in the community, within this building.

Cooling centers condition the air for the occupants of the space, protecting them from intense heat events. By combining the capabilities of air conditioning with filtration, it is possible to assist in mitigating the lack of medical grade filtered air that was drastically felt during the COVID pandemic, where prices rose 1000%. The chief mission is to not forget the lessons of past crises, so that through this intervention, the community can be more prepared.

This project does not fit into one typology, it has care at its core, while subverting the normative relationship of medical care practices and bringing those who share health information from across the table and behind the normative information desk into the community space.