They are at work all around us; why haven’t we seen them? This seminar will aim to define a family of tools–environmental machines–intentionally designed constructs that perform tasks centered on assessing, adjusting, or modifying the environment. From historic constructs such as wind towers and water screws to contemporary tools like construction and earthworks robots, sand and sediment motors, climate?regulating tools that seed clouds and manipulate weather, digital twins simulating environmental or ecological performance, and even materials that are deployed as machines by leveraging their intrinsic behaviors, eco-machinae have taken on and continue to take on many new forms. Yet the ways these machines modify landscapes, where their intelligence and power source lie, and how they influence design in light of emerging technologies, remain largely unarticulated. At a pivotal moment in terms of the tools at our disposal, ones capable of redefining how we build at large, we will investigate this under?addressed, never?clearly?defined category of machines that have so far escaped conventional historiographies yet determine our evolving relationship with the environment.

The seminar aims to deeply understand and examine how machines modify landscapes. To aid this effort, we will blend:

1. Theoretical inquiry: we will start by defining eco-machina through lectures and readings, including texts, concepts, and historical case studies that will help us define this arc of machines. Aiming to draw a historic cross?section of eco-machinae, we will explore machines through a series of interfaces with the environment. Borrowing from and expanding on scientific terminology, we will define and examine machines operating in vitro (in labs), in situ (on site), in silico (in simulations), in vivo (in living materials), and more.

2. Drawing?based case study analysis: which will help us define the hitherto unaddressed dimension of machine–environment interfaces, one in the shadow of human–machine and emerging machine–machine interfaces. It will help us to develop ways to express how machines and environments interact and express the results of this interaction and modification over time. Graphic examples will be provided.

3. Design an eco-machina: group projects will develop and prototype an intelligent construct in response to a selected environmental condition or site. This year, we will give particular focus to material-based mechanisms that operate either on or through the alteration of material properties. For example, a tool that modifies a material on?site, or one that harnesses a material property such as swelling, shrinking, decay, or conductivity to modify landscapes. We will emphasize a bioregional approach, working with locally available materials, ecological processes, and environmental constraints to develop meaningful, responsive interventions. Possible projects might include tools for handling or shaping materials such as soil, wood, or rocks for on?site construction; structures providing erosion control or aiding the formation of micro?habitats in arid zones; damming structures for filtering water and aiding ecological restoration; bio?habitats tailored to the needs of specific species; and more.

Through these combined methods of inquiry, from theory to analysis, to hands?on experimentation, the students will develop an understanding of eco machinae as constructs that connect materials, tools, and the built and natural environment, and will practice translating this understanding into design by developing constructs driven and shaped by mediated material–tool–environment relationships.

Coursework includes readings, participating and co?leading in?class discussions, individual research and analysis of case studies through drawing, and a collective group project developing and prototyping a material?based eco-machina.