Jessica Strang & Mike Taylor
St. Augustine, Florida
Drawing & Illustration, Cultural Organizing
Global warming is already a reality, and Florida’s peninsula is especially vulnerable. Its coastal communities can serve as a test case for adaptation for the entire country. With a saturated palate as well as the improbable blueprints of disastrous coastal overdevelopment, each page of The Inevitable Coast is a snapshot of paradise lost, an architectural rendering of a possible adaptation, and an exercise in speculative fiction, asking: how do we ameliorate an ecological disaster already affecting the entire country? What will the neighborhoods of the next decade look like, after banks cut funding to coastal home building? What will food production look like? What about prisons? The Inevitable Coast is a book accompanied by a website, updated to include new research, articles, and source material concerning the ever-changing dynamics of climate science and global capital’s responses.
Mike Taylor is a Florida-based painter and screen printer. Along with architectural designer, Jessica Strang, his current book project, The Inevitable Coast, is an investigation of social and architectural adaptive possibilities in the era of global warming. Taylor’s hand-printed, hand-bound books have been collected and exhibited widely. He was awarded a Yaddo residency for 2021.