ARCH 4980.02

Re-coupling Culture and Nature; a new agency for architecture 1

 Faculty: JULIA WATSON

In the midst of economic and biospheric crises, we have a unique opportunity to redirect the course of development unfolding within our global natural reserves. Strong evidence linking the co-existence of cultural and biological diversity is reframing the global approach to protecting reserves at sacred sites. New approaches are needed to combat the assault on this diversity, which is caught in a tide of contestations, driven by the unregulated influences of the global economy.

Contestations arise from the intrusion of urbanization, agriculture, tourism and the compounded effects of climate change. As these drivers of change infiltrate different territories within the biosphere they migrate from urban agglomerations to remote landscapes.  These landscapes are increasingly found in developing countries and face the strain of expanding demands and patterns of consumption from developed nations.  At the same time, the emerging economies of China, India, Brazil and others are rapidly prospecting these territories in an effort to secure long-term critical resources that have been over-exploited domestically.[1]

In remote landscapes, the dual threat of over-exploitation and mismanagement requires a new ethic of conservation and environmental stewardship. By ignoring these patterns we will risk approaching tipping points that could catastrophically reduce the capacity of ecosystems to provide essential services. By acknowledging the links between biological and cultural diversity we may formulate the antagonist for the design process. With a long-term vision to slow climate change through the sustenance of biological diversity, the design process will seek to re-imagine the global approach to protecting humanity, through the deployment of proto-ecological design strategies.

The landscape architects role in this mission is to re-couple culture and nature, connecting new design agendas to traditional ecological knowledge and scientific expertise.  In the process, new material technologies will be introduced that systematically restructure the landscape and improve social and economic conditions. Design strategies will consider the multi-scalar and multi-valent dimensions of the drivers of change and envision alternative futures using scenario analysis models.

“In this era of specialists, each sees only his problem and is unaware or intolerant of the larger frame into which it fits. It is also an era dominated by industry, in which the right to make a dollar at whatever cost is seldom challenged.”[2]

While exploring new modes of design, we will re-envision the ‘architect’, as a multi-disciplinary agent for critical change: newly traversing varied contestations in the landscape. The design agent will examine and map existing systems and their autonomous conditions with a view to creating synergies. In contested landscapes, we will be challenged to determine how design intervention as ecological prosthetic can be embedded at a moment of confluence. Mitigation and adaptation deployed through design intervention could therefore adjust potential tipping points.

Conflicting environmental and economic agendas have opened up a window of opportunity to re-establish the biospheric agenda as the crucial foundation upon which future expansion will most successfully proceed. On this point, the thesis will be similarly founded on the goal of interrogating global drivers by directly engaging the most valuable resources in landscapes: cultural and biological diversity.