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.
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.
Julia WatsonOn the responsibility of designers to integrate and recontextualize indigenous technologies
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
Work in Progress: Nhi Tran’s Hotel within the Shikumen Home
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 conceptual approach features a bridge across the Lake Pit at La Brea Tar Pits. Rendering courtesy of WEISS/MANFREDI.
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’sMonument 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.
Drawing by Khoa Vu for his GSD thesis, “Grayscale.”
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
Studios by Daniel D’Oca present a corrective for racial inequities
GSD prof and alum Dan D'Oca, along with students and the local community, are creative in how they approach the legacy that systemic racism has had on urban growth in St. Louis. Jon Chase/Harvard Staff Photographer
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.”
Examples of some of the comics that students from D’Oca’s “Affirmatively Further” studio created to more easily explain the city’s history of inequality. Comics by (clockwise) Jake Watters, Ximena de Villafranca, and Ruben Segovia.
A collage of all the people that D’Oca’s studio course met on Dr. Martin Luther King Dr. in St. Louis. Photo courtesy of Dan D’Oca.
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
From source material to demolition, Wheelwright-winner Aude-Line Dulière untangles the film industry’s elusive supply chain
The De Angelis workshop adjacent to the Cinecittà studios in Roma. This craftsmen family has been casting plaster and molding fibreglass for four generations.
“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.
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.
Aude-Line Dulière On how deconstruction and cataloging that could provide long-term financial and ecological benefits to the global film industry
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.
Freshly-built movie set components at the studios of Bry-sur-Marne in a suburb of Paris. Reusing wall segments, or “flats” in industry jargon, was commonplace until the 1990s. But high cost of storage, real estate pressure and advancements within the recycling industry has made single-use the norm. Local guilds of construction managers, carpenters, painters and production designers have recently joined efforts to advocate for sustainable practices within the studio ecosystem. One of their visions is to reinstate a studio “flats library,” where projects could rent flats for specific sets.
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.”
Material storage in a fabrication workshop in Hungary. In a suburb of Budapest, recycling happens in tight, informal flows, where wood waste is delivered directly to surrounding farming families to fuel their wood stoves during the harsh winter months.
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
Work in Progress: Kira Clingen’s observation tower at the End of the Rhine
The strange and unexpected are disappearing from our towns and cities. In Europe and America especially, formulaic architecture has become a dominant mode, with unique structures demolished in favor of the more easily repeatable and unremarkable. Standardization also creeps into the countryside by way of expanding urban peripheries, where these designs are often found in abundance, and prompts concern regarding the disappearance of the natural. It is precisely these sterile environments that draw the attention of Robin Winogrond, design critic in Landscape Architecture and a founding partner of Studio Vulkan Landscape Architecture (Zurich/Munich). She had her students focus on such spaces in the Fall 2019 studio Geographical Reenchantment: Swiss Landscape Interventions between Atmosphere, Function + Experience in an effort to explore how landscape architects can transform banal, sterile, or even disappointing environments into those that stimulate the people who enter them.
“There’s a problem using the word landscape because no matter how hard we try, it still tends to conjure images of the pretty places ‘out there’—the field with the farmhouse, etc.—that are getting smaller and smaller all the time,” Winogrond says. “We’re talking about the contemporary landscape, or any space under the open sky. How can we look at those not-pretty places and find a powerful voice that’s worth being experienced?”
There’s a problem using the word landscape because no matter how hard we try, it still tends to conjure images of the pretty places ‘out there’—the field with the farmhouse, etc. We’re talking about the contemporary landscape. How can we look at those not-pretty places and find a powerful voice that’s worth being experienced?
Robin WinogrondOn how landscape architects can transform banal, sterile, or even disappointing environments into those that stimulate the people who enter them
These contemporary landscapes are separated into three distinct but entwined layers: the natural, the cultural, and, much less frequently acknowledged, the imaginary. “At the cultural level, humankind starts to form things to cover up the layer of raw nature, to suffocate and manipulate it,” Winogrond explains. “Many groups—the ecology lobby, the recreation lobby, the farmers’ lobby, the highway and traffic engineering lobby—form the landscape as an operative resource for humans. But above these layers is the way we experience the landscape, which is based on fantasy, memory, longing, and other sensibilities like embodied experience. When you start to seriously consider that, you move into the perceptive realm and can talk about how we as landscape architects can use this to form our attitudes toward place in terms of stone, woods, vegetation, clouds, air, wind, fog, underground water, and smells and how they speak to an incredible need inside of us. And when you engage at the phenomenological level, you see how these three layers vibrate with each other.”
Coaxing the imagination in this way requires an attention to narrative. While architecture writ large is often presented and perceived through static images such as photographs, landscape architecture is predisposed to acknowledge the dynamism of our lived experiences as we move through and within a given space. This exists at a material level, too, where the decay inherent in vegetation leads to its regeneration. With this understanding, landscape architects can lead people through an experience. “You need that narrative to choreograph space, and you have to imagine it all as a coherent whole,” Winogrond says. What is critical, however, is that a space’s possibilities are never limited. “You never say what everyone has to experience,” she adds.
Kira Clingen’s (MDes ’21) “End of the Rhine” is a 1,250-foot-long ramp leading to two observation decks. “By choreographing a path through the strange structures that the dams and dredging produce, the platforms provide a juxtaposition between the natural and the culturally engineered.”
In the studio, Kira Clingen (MLA/MDes ’21) addressed one aspect of decay and the mass movement of natural material with a project located where the Rhine River enters Lake Constance near the Switzerland-Austria border. Multiple dams in the area shift the path of the Rhine itself and also transport silt to prevent the stoppage of the river’s flow. “It’s a huge machine going through the landscape,” Winogrond says. “They built the dams two miles into the middle of the lake, which creates a curving, double-dam image. The water is in the dam and outside of it. Every day, a machine dredges the silt and makes shapes with it alongside the dam—biotope habitats, among others.”
Clingen designed a 1,250-foot-long ramp along which people walk toward two observation decks: one with an unobstructed view of the Alps, the other looking out to the “constant evolution of dredged sediment, spontaneous vegetation and rushing water through the Rhine channel at the Rhine-Constance confluence.” By choreographing a path through the strange structures that the dams and dredging produce, the platforms provide a juxtaposition between the natural and the culturally engineered. They invite an appreciation of the latter’s beauty both in contrast to and in concert with the surrounding mountains.
Lu Dai’s (MLA ‘20) “Dance in the Fog” highlights the presence of the fog at the popular tourist destination at the summit of Hoher Kasten in Switzerland.
While Clingen worked on a landscape rarely considered for its splendor, Lu Dai (MLA ‘20) reconceptualized a site renowned for creating feelings of awe. The summit of Hoher Kasten, a mountain in eastern Switzerland, has become co-opted by the tourism industry for its spectacular views: Visitors come for the walking trails and to eat at the aptly named Panoramic Restaurant. Yet despite efforts by humans to control this area and maximize experiences dependent on clear visibility, the weather—especially the fog—remains unpredictable. Instead of accentuating the normative interests of the tourism lobby, Lu recognized that fog is the dominant voice in the area and that it could be the subject of an intervention that highlights it as “mysterious, unexpected, fleeting, constant, horrific, thrilling, and beautiful.”
In tune with the area’s topography, she directs the fog—and the people moving within it—using a series of walls, stairs, and platforms, some of which have holes through which the fog moves and others that accentuate the sound of the wind. In total, the structures inspired by the fog’s unalterable presence introduce novel means by which, she argues, the visitors feel attuned to “danger,” “nature,” “the unexpected,” and themselves. The existing infrastructure at the summit and the fog that was until then considered largely in negative terms become the starting point for, in Winogrond’s assessment, “a magical experience.”
In each of these projects and others produced by Winogrond’s Studio Vulkan, the goal is not destruction in an effort to create more beautiful, tranquil, or sustainable alternative structures, nor is it to become confrontational with various lobbies that use the land as an economic resource. Rather, the interventions begin by accepting the existing contemporary landscape as a lived reality and then transforming it in ways which shift our engagement from passive to active.
“I feel courageous about going into these strange places and having the patience to say, ‘What’s going on here? What are we actually talking about and what can we express?’” Winogrond says. “It’s not a plea for the laissez-faire. Our cities becoming generic is a dramatic problem. But that’s not in our hands as landscape architects. What is in our hands is a willingness to wrangle with these landscapes. It’s a great moment of freedom, and I think the students were happy with their projects because they all found keys to doors that turn these difficult situations into something you really would want to experience. It’s a moment of hope and almost joy to have an approach that there is no bad place.”
“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.
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.” 
