Responsive Technologies in Landscape Architecture

The interface between the constructed environment and ecological systems is slowly blurring strategies in urbanism, biological engineering, and technological interface. These strategies encourage the application of responsive technologies to create new relationships through sensing and feedback, developing novel ecological systems. This novel set of ecologies demand a deconstruction of settlement, infrastructure, and biological systems to frame the constructed landscape as a synthesizer of biotic and abiotic processes. The interstices of these new relationships become the medium in which this course will examine new potentials for sensing, monitoring, and automation as a starting point to reimagine coastal infrastructure. The research in the course will define the role of responsive technologies to focus on the development of active methods for management of biological systems. This methodology spans a range of scales from micro adjustments of processes, to regional management and monitoring. Primarily, responsive technologies create a recursive and iterative relationship between computation and ecology. The course will focus on a primary method of inquiry, which will be to unpack coastal and riverine infrastructures through the lens of what Levi Bryant calls, an alien phenomenology. This refers to a mode of sensing through objects (machines) and speculates or identifies the connections between these objects. The resultant framework will then be continually modified to test methods of sensing and feedback using media, mockups, and prototypes.

The first class on Monday, January 23rd will begin at 9:30 am (instead of the regular 8:30 am start time).