Land-Use Strategies for a Purple State: Studio considers ways of protecting Virginia’s Eastern Shore from devastating sea rise

A lone farmstead is perched on the edge of a creek on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. Dozens of acres of cornfields unfurl behind the structure, eventually blending into a swampy marshland lined with salt hay. On first glance, the house and its manicured lawn are a postcard of idyllic coastal living. But they also inhabit a deeper role, as a barrier between the residents’ increasingly precarious livelihood and the area’s continued coastal erosion. Each year, exaggerated salinity in the soil creeps a foot further inland, threatening the survival of the Eastern Shore’s farming industries even before the land is actually claimed by the sea. In the next 40 years, two-thirds of the land mass of Saxis Island, where this farm is located, will disappear into the adjacent Chesapeake Bay. With just three to four feet of additional sea level rise, Saxis will be swallowed by water on all sides, rendering its approximately 230 inhabitants isolated and stripped of their farming resources. Yet many residents of Saxis and other high-risk towns dotted along the 70-mile peninsula refuse to budge. Is continued human settlement of a coastal area poised for such extreme and potentially devastating change truly worth fighting for? What sort of circumstances—both practical and ideological—anchor the drive to remain? And how can new land-use strategies enable the continued occupation of a region whose residents largely don’t believe in climate change? It’s a challenging, fascinating premise with no easy answer. Gary Hilderbrand, the Peter Louis Hornbeck Professor in Practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, devoted his option studio last term to uncovering the stakes of these questions—for Virginia and beyond. “This was unlike any studio I’ve done in my 30 years of teaching at Harvard,” says Hilderbrand. “It was much more expansive and experimental—the students chose the sites and topics for their research, which resulted in a wide-ranging atlas of ideas.” As per usual in Hilderbrand’s studios, the dozen fourth-year students in Adrift and Indeterminate: Designing for Perpetual Migration on Virginia’s Eastern Shore hit the ground running. A four-day visit to the Eastern Shore in the third week of the semester enabled them to get close to their sources and stake out the nature of their projects. A shared camp site nurtured communal discussion, while the support of a sponsor family drew the students intimately into the lives and stories of the local farmers, fishermen, scientists, and employees of the Barrier Islands Center who call the peninsula home. An induction to proper fieldwork methodology from the GSD’s Gareth Doherty—who teaches at the intersection of landscape architecture and anthropology—helped prime students for the task at hand. Background knowledge on climate change in coastal cities, gleaned from a full year of core studios the year before, coupled with the regional expertise of local coastal geologist Chris Hine, nudged the students’ projects into a unique terrain. The students designed interventions—both specific and speculative—for sustaining human habitation of precise areas along the Eastern Shore, while also responding to the broader issue of future coastal life in the throes of climate change. “As the studio kicked off, the topic of migration was and continues to be very timely in US politics,” Hilderbrand explains. “Farmers and watermen have been migrating away from the edge of land here for generations. It also scales up and presents a picture of coastal climate change as a long-term phenomenon that has witnessed centuries of human movement.” The studio’s outcomes—both an “atlas” of investigation and a collection of design projects that look both forward and back in time to propose ideas for the future survival of the area—is a layered and dense body of work that belies the short time frame of the course. The atlas work is loosely divided into 10 categories: Settlement, Ecosystem, Atmosphere, Place, Economy, Property, Building, Sand, Protection, and Displacement. The subsequent design projects interlock through their shared ambition to unearth a dense network of political, cultural, technological, and religious histories of the area that frame the residents’ position on climate change and the future survival of the region. Beginning with the region’s self-determined infrastructures built in the 19th and 20th centuries (such as stick-built barns raised by entire communities), to the first signs of federal intervention (including light houses and post offices), and finally, to the introduction of transportation infrastructure (including the railroad in the 1880s and later, highways), we witness a land of self-selected and resourceful residents who have carved out a life in a region many of us would write off as remote and inhospitable. Tracing the cultural influence of American Methodism (which was founded here) and contemporary conservative politics (more than 50 percent of voters in the region supported Trump in the 2016 presidential election, with some local districts reporting far higher), the atlas gracefully traverses the social conditions underlying the area’s general resistance to notions of climate change. But it burrows deeper than party lines, examining the narrative of constant displacement that has framed life here on the Eastern Shore for as long as anybody can remember. From erecting 12-foot-high platforms to elevate their homes, to annual “sand nourishment” initiatives aimed at stabilizing the coastline, residents undertake elaborate measures to sustain life in a place that, on an almost daily basis, recasts its boundaries between wet and dry. The economy section of the atlas examines the transition of a place that was once considered a breadbasket of America into an area that now mostly produces poultry and soy products in addition to the ubiquitous blue crab. Those industries persist despite the fast erosion of the shoreline, the breaking apart of the 23 barrier islands strung across the peninsula’s east coast, and the unstoppable salination of what’s left of farmable land. The atlas also investigates the complex understanding of the landscape among residents. People have been moving upward and away from the barrier islands for the last 200 years; climate change has always been happening here, albeit a lot more slowly than it is now. For these locals, the perpetual shape-shifting of the landscape has been a part of life; as such, they are hesitant to view the increased severity of change in recent years as anything out of the ordinary. With this context in mind, the studio worked to design possible means of managing the impact of climate change that are, in Hilderbrand’s words, both real and speculative. “There are essentially two stances on sea level rise right now,” explains Hilderbrand. “One says that resiliency is not an option and that we have to retreat, while the other suggests that there are reasonable ways of protecting these assets—indeed, peoples’ lives and livelihoods—for some admittedly questionable period of time.” Hilderbrand’s studio wanted to posit a third way by seeing those beliefs as two end poles of a spectrum. How might fresh land-use strategies mitigate the impact of climate change on the coast by encouraging alternative ways of inhabiting it? Is it possible to carve out a new understanding of the intensifying forces of erosion and salination that does not inherently clash with the residents’ perception of these processes? The students offer up a variety of innovative ideas, some of which read as clear architectural interventions while others are more ideologically oriented and suggest revamped notions of civic space and understandings of heritage. A particularly fascinating project ditches the coast for a through line that unfurls across the peninsula. Selecting a site bookended by the Barrier Islands Center on the ridge of the peninsula and the Box Tree Farm (owned by the Nature Conservancy) on the shore to the east, the student suggests this space as a new kind of public commons, on what was formerly private property. With a focus on building up the inland area while the coastline is changing, this forward-looking proposal—along with several others—encourages residents to remain aware what it means to work as a collective with respect to land tenure and to continually build on higher ground. While students were predominantly drawn to the studio because of its rural subject (“I am committed to turning our students into urbanists, but this studio became irresistible to me,” remarks Hilderbrand), two of the ten projects focus on Cape Charles, a historic city built by a 19th century developer at the termination of the Eastern Shore Railroad. The majority of Cape Charles is predicted to be underwater in 60 years. One student suggests sacrificing two blocks of the city spilling out onto the beach that were not part of the original design, in order to buy time for a 30-year migration of the historical houses. Another suggests rebuilding the city entirely and densifying it on higher ground. There are also projects that propose working with the eventual flooding of the land rather than against it. Fisherman Island, which grew from a 19th-century shipwreck at the southernmost reach of the barrier islands, is the only landmass on the Eastern Shore that’s increasing in size. One student proposes an elevated walkway that transforms the disturbed land of the highway side-slopes into a visitor experience through a new observatory that would also enable a protected species of turtles to pursue their natural migration patterns. Arriving by boat would allow more explorers to visit than the current six-person daily quota, and it would potentially provide more jobs in an area with a higher-than-average unemployment rate. Another project reimagines Willis Wharf in Little Hog Island, on the seaside, some 80 years in the future: thick forests of mangroves suppress wave action, with additional help from a dyke, elevated buildings, and residents who have transitioned from land-based agriculture to aquaculture. “I try to root my teaching in real problems, direct evidence, and real places, with real experts helping us frame the work and measurable data backing up our suppositions,” says Hilderbrand, who maintains a similar approach at his landscape architecture practice, Reed Hilderbrand. “But it must be speculative, too. We have to imagine a future that we cannot quite predict. This is especially true with regard to the dire predictions we face on the climate front.” Hilderbrand’s studio offers up solutions for remaining connected to the landscape in both work and life, and proposes design interventions that take on board the dominant ideologies of those inhabiting this increasingly precarious peninsula. The atlas can be understood as something of a roadmap for a more mindful and experimental approach to landscape architecture. In the face of an unpredictable future, more generous speculation, and the entanglement of opportunities it conjures, might just be exactly what we—as well as the residents of Virginia’s Eastern Shore—so desperately need.

Work in Progress: Sarah Fayad’s strategy for equitable distribution of affordable housing in Los Angeles

Sarah Fayad (MLAUD ’20) describes her final project for the option studio “Affordability Now!” led by Daniel D’Oca, fall 2019.

First-ever compendium of indigenous technologies provides a powerful toolkit for climate-resilient design

The design field is at an inflection point. It must challenge its repertoire, rethink technology, and begin to see biodiversity as a building block of urban environments. Julia Watson’s lush and meticulous new book, Lo—TEK: Design by Radical Indigenism, provides a blueprint for sustainable architecture in the 21st century. For designers of the built environment, it is a first-ever compendium of overlooked design technologies from indigenous groups around the world. For the intrepid traveler or curious citizen, it is an invitation to know millennia-old societies thriving in symbiosis with nature thanks to local ingenuity, creativity, spirituality, and resourcefulness. For the indigenous groups represented, it is a source of satisfaction from seeing contemporary design scholarship catch up with their time-tested practices. And for Watson, the book is a means to name, document, and create a toolkit for a design movement. “Lo-TEK,” is built on “lesser known technologies, traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and indigenous cultural practices and mythologies,” as she writes in the book’s introduction. It explores the space where design and “radical indigenism” meet. Conceived of by Princeton professor and Cherokee Nation member Eva Marie Goutte, radical indigenism encourages us to look to indigenous philosophies to rebuild our knowledge base and generate new dialogues across genres. Watson is advocating a movement that merges these beliefs with design to yield sustainable and climate-resilient infrastructures. “I realized that all of these high-tech, repackaged, nature-based, eco-technologies come from a long lineage of indigenous technologies and knowledge. We can look to cultures that have been living with natural systems and understanding how to develop civilizations with complex ecosystems as a grounding for moving forward as designers,” Watson explains. “It’s a movement toward rethinking how urbanism interacts with nature.” Lo-TEK investigates that movement through its evidence base: more than 100 indigenous innovations from 20 countries. They are divided by ecosystem—mountains, forests, deserts, and wetlands—which underscores the link between the technologies and the environments and communities that gave birth to them. The Tofinu people of Benin’s wetlands built a city on stilts surrounded by 12,000 man-made aquaculture pens. The acadja, as the paddocks are called, house fish and wildlife that rival commercial aquaculture systems in scale and productivity but with better environmental benefits and none of the drawbacks. Lo-TEK’s arresting cover features the living root bridges and ladders of the Khasi hill tribe of northern India, one of the world’s more innovative examples of vernacular architecture. In a practice dating to 100 BCE, the Khasi train rubber fig trees to grow into bridges and ladders that allow them to navigate steep ravines and flooded river crossings during the monsoon season. Each bridge takes one generation to build, and they have proven to be the only structures that can withstand the unforgiving monsoon rains. The book is itself a design feat. Co–art directed by Watson and W-E studio, its Swiss brochure binding exposes the spine and the book’s “construction and materiality.” The detached cover also allows readers to map each technology to an altitude guide printed on its inside. Diagrams and illustrations are rendered simply to make the complex systems they depict easier to grasp. The aesthetic coherence between the many photographs belie sourcing from 100 different photographers. And gold foiling plays up the contradiction between the true value of indigenous technologies and the fact that they are “incredibly undervalued because they’re not even recognized as technology,” says Watson. This is another central message of the book: that the design world must upend the prevailing paradigm that has revered “hard” (single-use) infrastructures, high-tech, and homogenous design, and the domination of nature while trivializing “soft” (multi-use) systems, local wisdom, vernacular architecture, and coexisting with nature. Identifying this hierarchy of beliefs as colonial and racist and labeling indigenous practices as technology are examples of Watson’s efforts at this disruption in Lo-TEK. “The book is trying to break all the tropes of what we understand about indigenous people and say that what we think of as primitive is actually innovative,” explains Watson. Watson is Australian, but long before the wildfires began tearing through her country, she was deeply concerned about climate change and committed to design-based responses that involve radical indigenism. The climate crisis has made it imperative, not only because many indigenous innovations are inherently sustainable but also because standard architectural approaches have exacerbated climate change. “We are looking for high tech solutions to deal with a problem that was created through this fascination with high tech and industrialization,” Watson says. Lo-TEK proposes an alternative way forward, with Watson and her fellow practitioners in the charge. “It’s up to designers now that they have this toolkit that extends our understanding of technologies that can be integrated and recontextualized in urban or peri-urban projects. We’re stuck in a paradigm of thinking conservation is this passive, fringe condition. It’s becoming apparent, however, that conservation landscapes and the management and adaptation of those landscapes are critical to survival. When you see forests being burnt at scale in Australia, you understand that these landscapes are interdependent with our cities. They impact our air quality, our survival. It’s a critical time for critical considerations for designers.”

Work in Progress: Nhi Tran’s Hotel within the Shikumen Home

Nhi Tran (MArch ’21) describes her final project for the option studio “Reflective Nostalgia: Alternative Futures for Shanghai’s Shikumen Heritage” led by Rossana Hu and Lyndon Neri, fall 2019.

December 2019 and January 2020 News Roundup

Located in Allston, the first phase of Harvard’s new Enterprise Research Campus is to be led by Tishman Speyer, Studio Gang, and Henning Larsen. Plans for the campus include a mix of research-focused companies, green space, residences, a hotel, and a conference center. The first phase of the 36-acre project will involve a 14-acre portion that has received initial regulatory approval for 900,000 square feet from the Boston Planning and Development Agency. “Capturing the spirit of innovation of the Enterprise Research Campus, our design will transform a former industrial site into a fertile new ground for the exchange of ideas and creative expression,” said Professor in Practice of Architecture Jeanne Gang, founder of Studio Gang. WEISS/MANFREDI, co-founded by Design Critic in Urban Planning and Design and Expert-in-Residence Michael Manfredi, has been selected by the the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHMLAC) to lead a master planning team in reimagining the La Brea Tar Pits. The Tar Pits’ 13-acre campus includes the world’s only active paleontological research site in a major urban area, as well as its asphalt seeps, surrounding parkland, and the George C. Page Museum building. WEISS/MANFREDI’s ‘Loops and Lenses’ concept forms a triple mobius that links all existing elements of the park to redefine Hancock Park as a continuously unfolding experience. Professor in Residence of Art, Design and the Public Domain Krzysztof Wodiczko’s Monument opened at Madison Square Park as part of the park’s public art program, Mad. Sq. Park. On view January 16 through May 10, 2020, and running from 5 to 8 PM Monday to Saturday, the installation will be complemented by a series of public programs, lectures, and events that expand upon the concepts explored within the work. The project, as well as other recent and upcoming work by Wodiczko, was featured in the New York Times article “A Monument Man Gives Memorials New Stories to Tell.” Aleksandr Bierig’s (PhD ’20) essay entitled “Visits to the London Coal Exchange, circa 1849.” won the Bowdoin Prize for Graduate Essay in the English Language. The Bowdoin Prizes, some of Harvard’s oldest and most prestigious student awards, are designed to recognize essays of originality and high literary merit, written in a way that engages both specialists and non-specialists. Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture Pablo Pérez-Ramos was recently awarded a 2019-2020 Faculty Research Grants from the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Islamic Studies Program at Harvard University. He plans to use the funds for travel and research in Algeria and Tunisia to investigate oases and agricultural landscapes in conditions of extreme aridity. Drawings of Khoa Vu’s (MArch I ’19) thesis “Grayscale,” advised by Gerald M. McCue Professor in Architecture Preston Scott Cohen, won the Ken Robert Memorial Delineation Competition 2019 (KRob), the most senior architectural drawing competition in the world. Organized by AIA Dallas since 1975, Vu’s drawing received Excellence in Hand Delineation in the Professional Category. “This prize is awarded to the best student and professional entries that embodies and celebrates the art of architecture as a tool for communication through hand delineations, sketches and renderings,” states the awards committee. Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture Danielle Choi was awarded a 2019-2020 William F. Milton Fund grant from the Office of the Vice Provost for Research. This funding supports research on landscape design, region, and infrastructural breaches of continental divides in North America. A related essay, “Where Were We? Phoenix is a Colorado River City” will be published in the forthcoming issue of the Journal of Architectural Education. Professor in Practice of Urban Design Alex Krieger’s new book City on a Hill: Urban Idealism in America from the Puritans to the Present was the topic of a number of recent literary reviews, including one by Professor Lizabeth Cohen of Harvard’s Department of History on the GSD website, as well as from Norman Weinstein in Architectural Record. The Bronx Museum of the Arts is honoring Diana Al-Hadid and Assistant Professor of Architecture Jon Lott with the Trailblazer Award at the Museum’s Visionary Duos Gala on March 2, 2020. The Bronx Museum of the Arts is the only free admission visual arts museum in New York City and it serves underserved children, students, and families and a growing international audience. The Gala is the Museum’s single most important fundraiser. Proceeds help keep the Museum free to the public, making its acclaimed exhibitions and programs accessible to all.

Studios by Daniel D’Oca present a corrective for racial inequities

Excerpted from the Harvard Gazette series, To Serve Better. Daniel D’Oca’s work focuses on the ways social inequities are reflected in the planning and building of communities, inequities that are perhaps most readily apparent when it comes to race. “I used to teach in Baltimore,” said the associate professor of urban planning at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. “I worked on an exhibition with my students about different artifacts and policies of segregation, and we used the city to study how segregation happens. People would always say, ‘You think Baltimore is an interesting case study, you should look at St. Louis.’” That city, like Baltimore, has a long history of stark inequality and physical division bolstered by practices such as racially driven zoning laws and the refusal by lenders to approve mortgages in  African American neighborhoods, making it harder for those residents to own property and adding to the racial wealth gap. Creating those kinds of separations has far-reaching impacts that go beyond housing, affecting education, crime rates, upward mobility, and even life expectancy. “There’s something called the Delmar Divide in St. Louis,” D’Oca said, explaining, “It’s a line that really does separate white and black, but it also divides income levels, the condition of houses, and the levels of vacancy. There’s a 20-year life expectancy difference between some of St. Louis’ highest median income ZIP codes and lowest median income ZIP codes.” In 2015 D’Oca created a studio course that expanded on the work of a nonprofit that was improving U.S. streets named after Martin Luther King Jr. The class walked St. Louis’ street and met with residents, business owners, and community development groups to better understand what improvements they wanted and what the barriers to achieving those were. The class then delivered practical solutions that the community could continue after the class ended. The next year, D’Oca widened his scope to the whole city with his course “Affirmatively Further: Fair Housing After Ferguson,” inspired by both the racial schisms that Michael Brown’s death exposed and an often unenforced section of the Fair Housing Act. “[The section says] you can’t just have all wealthy people, or all white people, living in a neighborhood,” D’Oca said. “You have to show that you have opportunities for low-income people to live in your community.” Similar to the previous course, D’Oca’s students started by meeting with different segments of the city, discussing their needs, brainstorming solutions, and then implementing the best ones. For a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, one student dug through local zoning laws and found that a good portion of African American homeowners could build a type of in-law suite called an “accessory dwelling unit” on their property, which they could then rent to newcomers, benefiting landlord, tenant, and community diversity. Two other students were inspired by a resident who pointed out that part of the reason for ongoing inequality was a lack of knowledge about how it happens. The students decided to create a book for fifth-graders explaining that segregation in the city came about because of a series of choices. The book’s approach took readers through decisions about the design of their rooms and how such design decisions affected their lives (e.g., making your door a certain width allows for passage of some things and not others) and then expanded the concept to the house, the neighborhood, the city, and the region. After that course, D’Oca and a group of students teamed up with the Commonwealth Project to work long term with Ward 3, a neighborhood in St. Louis that is 94 percent African American and has some of the highest rates of poverty in the city, coupled with the lowest home values and life expectancy rates. “One of the things that we did for the studio [course] was decide to make a newspaper that has all these interesting tidbits about the neighborhood and about local leaders.” The publication also includes articles about how to benefit from government-funded home repairs and how to maintain or buy vacant lots. “St. Louis is fortunate in a way,” D’Oca said about the future of the city. “The young people will come to St. Louis. People of all races are going to decide that city living is for them. I don’t want to say it’s inevitable, but it’s likely, and I think that if St. Louis is smart it can get ahead of this issue and start to ensure that this development benefits people who are there now, but it requires time, money, and planning. It requires strong leadership.” Daniel D’Oca (MUP ’02) is associate professor in practice of urban planning at Harvard Graduate School of Design. He has worked in St. Louis on a variety of city planning projects. He is also a co-founder of Interboro Partners, a New York City–based research and design office that engages with cities through writing, teaching, and professional practice.

From source material to demolition, Wheelwright-winner Aude-Line Dulière untangles the film industry’s elusive supply chain

“What does it take to compose an image?” is the central query for architect Aude-Line Dulière, winner of the 2018 Wheelwright Prize, regarding the temporary environments built for cinema. This question drives her recent work, which has focused on the flow of the material environment and supply chains within the global film industry. Since graduating from the GSD in 2009, Dulière has contributed to the field as an architect at David Chipperfield Architects in London, taught and researched with the Brussels based cooperative Rotor, and worked on film sets. She jumped at the chance to extend her reach with the grant and to speak with us about her recent travels. “The grant was a wonderful facilitator to actually gain access to an inaccessible world,” Dulière says. The Wheelwright Prize, notable for its investigative approach to modern design, has a long history of helping young architects to expand their knowledge through intensive travel and cross-cultural platforms. For Dulière, this meant spending time on movie production sets in Paris, Budapest, Belgium, and Rome to explore the intersection of architecture and film. It is an industry that has delighted architects for decades through its simultaneous use of advanced technology and traditional building craftsmanship—digital manipulation in tandem with hand-worked material. The fast-paced nature of the film circuit, with its capacity to create a set, film a movie, and break down the set immediately after, multiple times a year, allows for constant innovation. Dulière explains, “With architecture you have to wait five years to see something built, but in the movie industry it can come together in six months.” It is within these speedy construction zones that Dulière finds promise. “The industry has the potential to be a pioneer in better practice because it moves so quickly. It’s a fast cycle of making and unmaking. It’s very exposed. It’s global. It’s a culture industry. It’s very fertile ground for the dissemination of new practices” she says. Dulière spent months planning: sorting out contacts, talking to movie guilds in half a dozen countries, and arranging access to an insular world notably protective of its practice. As a major cultural industry, film sets are notoriously impenetrable due to copyright laws and protections of intellectual property. “It’s hard to get invited onto a movie set if you are not formally employed or working for them,” Dulière said. “I’m coming on with a new set of ideas, researching, and observing from the workshop to the offices, envisioning the future of the industry.” After spending six months on public relations to lay the groundwork for research, Dulière’s hard work was rewarded. She flew to Rome to shadow on a movie production site. To root her research in the raw material, Dulière likes to start an initial inquiry with a substance used on set. “My strategy is to find a sort of trigger, a thread to pull,” she says. “It could be, for example, fiberglass. I will start with fiberglass and I will explore how it is being used, and then find which companies are producing fiberglass, and find which are actually recycling the material, and then find where it’s being stored and how, and pull, pull, pull, until I find the end.” She’s untangling the supply chain from source to demolition. “It is amazing what they can achieve with fiberglass,” she says. “On some sets they’re making fake stone with it. It looks exactly like stone; it’s only when it’s backlit or when the sun shines through the material that you can tell it’s fabricated. Fiberglass is, however, a very problematic material because there is no obvious recycling route—it mostly goes straight into landfills. In the case of boats, for example, there are hulls being sunk under the sea to avoid paying for waste management. This is sort of the end of the thread—finding out where and how the material is disposed of, and how much it costs to throw away.” This was a major insight for Dulière: the construction budget does not always follow all the way through to disposal. And for an industry like film with a lot of moving parts and parameters, the bottom line is usually the guiding force. “Some production houses, for example, will buy medium density fiberboard over plywood, because MDF is slightly cheaper, but because of its large glue content it is highly polluting, which means it is more expensive to dispose of. But because building budgets are not taking into account waste management since that labor is normally outsourced, they end up paying more in the long run.” Clearly, a valuable insight. Obtaining access to the studio workshops and those actually handling and shaping the material is essential for Dulière. She has found beauty in the recent craftmanship she has seen. “I’ve really been impressed with the plaster work!” she says. “I was on a set where the plaster masters were working with their own tools that they themselves had made to construct a curved element. It was something you’d think would be done by a machine or robot but here was this highly traditional workmanship.” Though the built settings for movies are only meant to be temporary environments, the industry maintains a reserve of skilled workers with technical expertise. Dulière explains, “It’s a strange field: I’ve found that film is a surprising repository of some crafts that have completely disappeared from architecture. The unions have protected the labor and craft, and have allowed them to flourish, so you have early-20th-century skill working in tandem with highly digitized technology.” This dichotomy, and the tension between the two, makes film production sets a unique space for thinkers like Dulière. The industry is very focused on making, creating, and building for the sake of the image. What it lacks, Dulière argues, is a little more equilibrium in deconstruction and cataloging that could provide long-term benefits that are both financial and ecological. “The unmaking, the dismantling, the breakdown is not often considered in the realm of art. There is not the idea of the art of unmaking. Everyone wants to build, to create, but careful deconstruction is becoming more meaningful, as well” she says. Dulière’s travels and case studies have generated a number of dynamic strategies for a more holistic future of the industry’s ecosystem. There is room for renovation and more awareness—such as developing a library of useable materials, fortifying links between various like-minded builders and recyclers, and establishing frameworks of operations that would allow for the strategic reuse of some materials. “To either reuse within the industry, which offers a lot of potential, or a cross-industrial reuse, which is also exciting, that is something that already exists to some extent but should be celebrated much more,” she explains. “Parts of sets can integrate into others or be repurposed. Reuse is not a new idea: if we rewind to early moviemaking days, they used flats—flats are the walls of sets. They would have a sort of library of sets and store them and they would be able to reuse them.” Dulière has presented some of her early findings at the Academy of Sciences at the Vatican. She’ll be looking for alternatives to polystyrene with a company based in Brighton that has experimented with sculpting cork, and there is a Ridley Scott Production on which she is aiming to assist. Overall, she has come away with a more comprehensive understanding of the European film industry ecosystem and a renewed excitement about how all of the complex moving parts come together to create something physical. “The beauty, the energy, the intensity of the industry. There is a lot of joy here,” she explains. “My aim is not only to learn, but to support and to contribute where I can, with perhaps policy proposals, bringing new tools to the table, or facilitating a new practice.” Though it would seem as though she is at the tail end of the experience, Dulière disagrees: “Well, no, I wouldn’t say that, absolutely not, for me, it’s really only beginning.”

Work in Progress: Kira Clingen’s observation tower at the End of the Rhine

Kira Clingen (MLA/MDes ’21) describes her final project for the option studio “Geographical Reenchantment: Swiss Landscape Interventions between Atmosphere, Function + Experience” led by Robin Winogrond, fall 2019.

Work in Progress: Calvin Boyd’s International African American Museum

Calvin Boyd (MArch I ’21) describes his final project for the option studio “Groundless” led by Andrew Zago, fall 2019.

Work in Progress: Nan Yang’s Modern Food Supply System

Nan Yang (MLA I ’20) describes her final project for the option studio “Feeding Boston” led by Eulàlia Gómez Escoda, fall 2019.