Are we a part of or apart from nature?
It is this seemingly simple query that drives the artistic project entitled Force of Nature, a title which has been brewing for the past three years but has become particularly poignant in the wake of two exceptionally brutal years of natural disasters.  Recent events have turned what was a simple but loaded question about our relationship with nature into a current events debate, and this debate is a global one in which the public has become passionately involved and about which they have become legitimately concerned and perhaps a little confused.  But beware—there is no promise of an answer to this difficult question at the end of this project. Explorations such as these do not provide such gratification.  Instead, Force of Nature offers an alternative mode of articulating our relationship to nature so that we might better understand why the initial question is worth asking.

Force of Nature is a frame through which our world might be experienced and understood. The frame is international in its reach but local in its strategy.  Ten Japanese artists have arrived in the Carolinas for six intensive, art-driven weeks during which time their interaction with city, town, and campus communities will cause physical transformations, some more evident, others more ephemeral.  UNC Charlotte will be reworked in a very visible and provocative fashion as Ayako Aramaki takes up residency in her temporary studios on the lawns around campus, and, inside the Storrs Gallery in the College of Architecture, Akira Higashi will be working with locally obtained, natural materials of his own choosing as he creates mini-environments that speak as much to the persistent human need for shelter as they express ancient technologies of construction.

As a college full of people who examine and seek innovative strategies of mediating between human beings and the world, the CoA at UNC Charlotte believes that architecture has much to gain from the work that Ayako and Akira will be doing in its midst. With green building  on the rise and sustainability—the new catch-all phrase for environmentally conscious design—resonating in the halls of architecture schools  worldwide, a renewed awareness and concern for the natural environment has penetrated the core of architectural education.  However, it would be to the detriment of architecture to see this turning toward nature as little more than a scientific project. It is the creative impetus of design that makes architecture something more than the sum of its building systems and structural components, and it is this creative moment, this architectural leap of faith, that fuels and is fueled by the artistic project that is Force of Nature.