Desert Futures. Scenarios for a World of Extremes

Desert Futures is a multidisciplinary studio at the intersection of research, spatial design, and activism. It aims to spatialize and make visible the tensions between cultural and natural systems, and design visions and strategies for habitation, transformation, and remediation that center on environmental justice and care in the face of the climate crisis and future uncertainties.
 
In the past century, the desert has been settled, mined, farmed, and bombed. It has served as a ground for all sorts of human experimentation. Transforming the desert into a productive or hospitable space has been the fixation of many (scientists, economists, industrialists, politicians, ideologists, artists, designers, engineers, and the market) and, by extension, modernity. The environmental consequences of these extractive practices are grave and include uncontrolled urbanization, soil pollution, depletion of resources, perpetual drought, disease, and extinction—all exacerbated by the climate emergency.
 
The World Atlas for Desertification predicts that by 2050, 90 percent of the Earth’s land will be degraded due to human actions, rendering many places across the world uninhabitable and expanding desert regions and the precarity of life within them. Learning from the desert as a planetary site and understanding these processes can help us not only develop scenarios and strategies for change but also speculate on how resources are governed, managed, and shared amongst various constituents (human and nonhuman) in extreme conditions.

The studio will be focused on the North American desert ecoregion, particularly on a selection of sites along the Mojave and the Sonoran deserts that demonstrate the entanglement between extraction, perpetual waste, irresponsible water management, inhabitation, and environmental degradation. There is an urgent need to reimagine these spaces in time of future uncertainty and the climate crisis.

The goal of the studio is to analyze and make visible the processes of the desert’s colonization, to identify extractive typologies of architecture, urbanism, infrastructure, and land use, and to design opportunities for their transformation based on the values of environmental and social justice and radical care.
 
The studio will use a pedagogy that fosters interdisciplinary collaboration, a whole environment/system approach, multi-scalar thinking, and an awareness of the relationships between physical and social environments in the face of uncertainty. Within this format, we will experiment with the agency of design to research, engage with various constituents, tell stories, develop strategies, and design interventions on the scale of the site and the scale of the system.

The studio will include guest lectures and conversations with Joseph Grima on Non-Extractive Architecture (Founder Space Caviar, Creative Director Design Academy Eindhoven), Dr. Maureen McCarthy on Native Waters on Arid Lands (Research Professor at the Desert Research Institute), Diana K. Davis DVM, Ph.D. on The Arid Lands (Chair, Geography Graduate Group. The University of California at Davis), and more.

The Future of Housing in Los Angeles

Like most cities in the US today, Los Angeles doesn’t build enough housing to keep up with demand, a fact that has contributed to what is arguably the worst affordable housing crisis in the country. In a desperate attempt to ameliorate this housing shortage, California state housing regulators recently charged Los Angeles with a seemingly impossible task: zone for 255,000 new homes or forfeit billions of dollars in federal affordable housing grants. For housing advocates in Los Angeles, this challenge, daunting as it is, presents an opportunity to radically reimagine how the city houses its residents: given how built up the city already is, adding so many new homes will require the design of bold new housing typologies, not to mention visionary thinking around site-selection, implementation, and finance. This studio invites students in all departments to help housing advocates in Los Angeles solve this very real problem by creatively identifying how Los Angeles can get to 255,000 and reimagine housing in the process. Following an analysis of Los Angeles’s diverse housing stock (despite its historic obsession with the single-family house, Los Angeles is home to a staggering number of residential typologies and experiments), a survey of new approaches to housing, and an investigation into the causes and consequences of the housing shortage, students will create bold new propositions for the future of housing in Los Angeles. Starting at the scale of the city, we will zoom in to understand how proposed solutions work at the neighborhood, block, building, and unit scale. A field trip to Los Angeles is planned, during which we will hear from dozens of leading housing designers, developers, planners, policymakers, activists, and historians.

Dreamscapes of Aurora: Geothermal Landscapes of Energy and Rejuvenation

“The people’s history of bathing is one of shared space. Histories and practices of the bath belong to histories and practices of the commons. Bathing routines are cultural rituals, architectural forms, and natural environments combined to make arts of living out of everyday necessity…Centered in the restless flux of our anthropo-scene, bathing is a way to dive into the complexities of culture-nature tension up to the points of dissonance and dissolution.”
                – Christie Pearson, The Architecture of Bathing: Body, Landscape, Art

This studio will focus on the geothermal landscapes of Iceland, exploring the illuminatory potential of this confluence of physical and metaphysical energy. Existing geothermal infrastructure will frame studies of renewable energy in the face of national and cross-national energy shortages and the global climate crisis. Concurrently, the studio will explore case studies of public bathing in Iceland and beyond, focusing on its cultural history and formal (as well as informal) typologies. Students will develop strategies for how to articulate correspondences between these systems across multiple spatiotemporalities.

The studio will engage the scale of the human body within Iceland’s supra-human landscapes of geologic and geothermal activity. Modalities of experiencing the landscape—from the somatic to the institutional—will be explored, pushing students to site-based design solutions that harness such overlapping energies to engage aesthetic and environmental dimensions in equal measure. The materiality and tactility of the body in water will be placed in counterpoint to the geologic timescale of molten energy moving from the core of the earth, from which we will seek to articulate an infrastructure of the sublime.

Transient Ecologies: The Landscape of Massive Temporary Dwelling

It is commonplace to think of our time as one of constant mobility, a concept that has been attached to geopolitical, cultural, and social definitions, as well as a guiding principle of individual and collective identities. Worldwide there are many large-scale, voluntary, and non-permanent population displacement events associated to religion, celebrations, work, or vacations; and many others that are forced, as in prisoner or refugee camps, informal settlements, etc. In all of them new ecologies emerge through the input and flow of foreign currencies, objects, consumer goods, all kinds of merchandise, lifestyles, personalities, imaginaries… and all of them have an impact in both the physical (material) and the perceived landscape, by altering its structures, organizations, and dynamics. These ephemeral relationships are constantly emerging and growing, questioning in the process the illusions of balance, permanence, and stability in landscape.

This Studio will deal with the reconfigurations produced by massive temporary settlements in order to reconsider the idea of the ephemeral in landscape conceptualization.

We will focus upon developing skills and creative sensibilities with regard to project design in a large site subject to temporary massive occupation. Specifically, students will develop landscape architecture projects for La Pampilla, which is both the name of the site and a 3 day-long yearly event upon which over 300.000 people take over 500,000 acres of open land in the city of Coquimbo to celebrate Chile’s independence.

We will specifically consider the ground as the fundamental material with which to operate, designing and modeling it to incorporate programmatic intensities, urban flows, ecological relationships, and occupation densities.

The objectives of the studio will be to advance the disciplinary bases of landscape architectural design and to develop a critical approach toward conceptualization and project design. We will navigate between theory and practice, with the intention of merging theoretical thinking with the practical aspects of design and project development. In this sense, intellect will not be privileged over technical competence, nor pragmatism over imagination. Rather, there will be a complete articulation of the many considerations that arise while developing a landscape project.

Trauma-Informed Design at Parrott Creek

Parrott Creek Child & Family Services – an 80-acre creekside facility in Portland, Oregon – support's some of Portland's most vulnerable community members: children and families caught up in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems. What began a farmhouse and ranch program to help kids “get away from it all” has grown into a robust organization offering expertise in a diverse array of programs and services that help children and families stabilize their lives, identify their strengths and develop life-long skills that support their success, all the while making our communities safer, healthier and more nurturing for all of us.

Inspired by Parrott Creek's mission and its own ongoing effort to re-imagine and improve its 80-acre site, this interdisciplinary studio will explore notions of trauma-informed design as a methodology for forward-looking design interventions. The studio's inquiry will include research, engagement with the Parrott Creek community and site, strategic planning scenarios and ultimately design of planning-scale, site-scale and building-scale proposals.

Aqua Incognita II: Reimagining Liquidity in the Mexican Altiplano

Aqua Incognita II engages students in research by design, furthering the GSD focus on Mexico’s urbanization challenges, by advancing nature-positive[1] reparative actions in the water-scarce Central Mexican altiplano. This critical zone[2]—originally a wetland territory and today bordering the thirstiest region of the nation, Mexico City—is engaged with unsustainable water scarcity urbanization, exacerbated by our human-induced climatic crisis. With the objective of helping communities that are struggling to see a viable future, the studio is focusing on the critical design question of how we can return liquidity to these former aquageographies and inhabitants.

Thanks to our ongoing research project, the feasibility of a Water Fund is being considered with the support of the Nature Conservancy in the Apan Plains. This subregion of the altiplano, in the states of Hidalgo and Tlaxcala, is formed by small settlements and medium-sized towns, whose source of agricultural employment is rainfed barley monoculture for the global beer industry, in tandem with industrial employment in global commodity chains—all contributing to aquifer depletion. Our work will seek to enhance climate justice through landscape conservation, livelihood restoration, and urban water circularity to counterweight desertification, biocultural loss and failing crops as well as unregulated urban growth.

To do so, we will conduct four acts of design research over the course of the semester by deciphering actors, critical cartographies, alter-actions and reimagining alter-livelihoods. First, in Acts I, II, III, we will map and analyze environmental, social, and political barriers and enablers to the conservation and equitable distribution of water across this rural-urban formerly liquid terrains. A studio field visit to Apan, projected for early October 2022, will enable additional on-site experience and inquiry. With this knowledge, in Act IV, we will formulate new design visions whose implementation could lead to more sustainable distribution and management of water resources. The studio forms part of a multi-year collaboration between Harvard GSD, local universities, the municipality of Apan, six Ejido (collective) commissariats, and a local office (eeTestudio). Many of these collaborators will participate in lectures and reviews.

[1] https://www.naturepositive.org/
[2] https://zkm.de/en/exhibition/2020/05/critical-zones

Towards Territorial Transition – Decarb Luxe

Why (the relevance):
The studio “Territorial Transition” invites students with diverse disciplinary backgrounds (landscape, urbanism, architecture) to design transition on a territorial scale that faces the current ecological, economic, social and spatial challenges. It focuses on the process of achieving the goal rather than the goal as such. We will think about the transition as a project in itself on a scale beyond the scale of the city. Crises have always influenced our spatial disciplines. Currently, the challenges of climate change, e.g. through increasing severe weather events, have once again confronted us with the fragility of the built environment – and thus raised the call for a rethinking of the goals and means of designing space. In the face of immense environmental and social challenges, a paradigm shift in planning and design approaches is needed. 

Where (the territory):
Luxemburg is a country on the scale of a metropolitan region, known for its carbon addiction, with the cheapest gasoline in Europe, the largest gas station in the world, a territory characterized by suburbanization, shopping malls and tax breaks that drew purchasing power away from its larger neighboring countries. Yet recently, Luxemburg has been aiming for radical change: The country plans to be carbon-neutral by 2050. It has raised fuel prices and is offering free public transportation throughout the country. Against this backdrop, the ambitious, internationally tendered state project ‘Luxemburg in transition’ was launched in 2021.

How (the methodology):
The studio will be structured around five relevant notions of territorial transition – Territory, Platform, Transition, Scale(s) and Uncertainty, in a successive sequence. The results of the work on each notion relate to and are based on the previous notion. During the courses comparable large-scale, international reference projects of territorial transition will be presented and discussed with external experts. The studio uses a combination of individual (design) work and collaborative (research) work in small groups of 2-3 students

When (the schedule):
The studio consists of about 75% in-person meetings and 25% Zoom tutoring during remote weeks. Instruction hours are generally Tuesdays and Thursdays from 2-6 p.m. (GMT-4), unless otherwise arranged with students. There are two intermediate reviews and a final review with invited guests.

What (the assignments):
By Review 1, we have explored, defined, and mapped our territory, as well as relevant coalitions of agents for transformation in response to the challenges of the territory. By review 2, we have developed a transition strategy for your territory, based on the these agents and translated it into a concrete spatial intervention. By the final review we have reflected about how to deal with the uncertainty of long-term transition processes and the overall representation of the studio output. The outcome of the group work will be a mapping of the current situation and the formulation of future development strategies for each selected transition pathway at the territorial level. The results of the individual work will be defined together with the students in terms of scale, scope and level of detail, as well as the representation techniques.

The Immeasurable Enclosure

This option studio offers immeasurability as the aesthetic and spatial expression of the public realm and asks students to imagine immeasurable single-space enclosures as forums for public life. Students in this course design one single-space environment using raw phenomena arrested by manufactured structures as the place for a public encounter of specific socio-cultural importance.

The garden and the room are considered the most fundamental spaces in the disciplines of landscape and architecture. These single-space environments are defined by enclosing and containing only a tiny part of the world and have conventionally been perceived as the means for designing coherent singular identities. However, the historical progression toward cultural diversity and social plurality has revealed the apparent inability of a single space to encompass multiple identities. This understanding led to alternative spatial models that invoked large-scale distributed spatial models as expressions and vehicles to accept and encourage multiple sensibilities and identities. Land mosaics, spatial fields, or network societies, to name a few, became the new spatial paradigms to advance social, cultural, and ecological plurality and diversity. Instead of encompassing as much of the physical world as possible, as these expansive paradigms propose, this course aims to reframe the discrete singular space as the mechanism to advance progressive social agendas by containing multiple sensibilities.

This course aims to imagine and design spaces that are simultaneously single-room buildings and single-patch landscapes. To this end, these uncategorizable enclosures—which can be outdoors, indoors, or in-between—demonstrate an aesthetic and spatial sensibility that defies traditional disciplinary categories but contributes to the long-standing tradition of these close quarters. These immeasurable enclosures are neither gardens nor rooms in a conventional sense. They are strange spaces that transcend the elemental nature of the garden and the room as building blocks for the expression of singular identities. These single-space environments aim to contain that which, by its definition and value, is immeasurable: the instance of acknowledging a different being.

Students in this studio work individually, and each student is responsible for proposing an immeasurable enclosure within their chosen socio-cultural context.

What Is a Lake? Post industrial Landscapes in Texcoco

Just a few kilometers north from Mexico City’s historic colonial center lies the arid desiccated lakebed of former Lago Texcoco. Historically, Texcoco has acted as a kind of biological appendix for the city’s urban metabolic waste, managing both sewage and solid waste land-fills. Today, it appears more like a graveyard of failed 20th century industrial projects. Conspicuous on satellite images of Texcoco are remnants of these projects: an abandoned salt harvesting operation sits like an ancient ammonite fossil by a billion-dollar airport runway whose terminals will never be built. The arresting emptiness of Texcoco’s sacrificial landscape has always stood in stark contrast to the density of the Megacity, perpetually implying a ‘land of opportunity’ or, at the very least, low-cost real estate. But like the quick-sand that always appears in colonial adventure narratives, Texcoco tends to (literally) swallow these ambitions. The soils of Texcoco are mostly water and highly compressible. The more water Mexico City extracts from under the city, the more Texcoco sinks, like a balloon that is constantly deflating. Any structure built on the soils of Texcoco will need to withstand an estimated 30 meter fall over the next 70 years.

Recently, there have been renewed attempts to think of the future of this former lake as something more than simply the toxic origin of asphyxiating dust-storms, the city’s best and most enduring monument to the colonial eco-cide of Aztlan, or the place where entrepreneurial ideas go to die. The architect Iñaki Echeveria is currently building an “ecological” park 36 times the size of Central Park in Manhattan, whose lush vegetation and questionable land acquisition practices have already inspired critique. However, the billion-dollar failure of the international airport has given these kinds of projects a new sense of urgency. The question of “what to do?” with Texcoco seems more urgent than ever, for a city whose social, economic, and ecological problems are increasingly inextricable. In this studio, we will take up this question in partnership with some of the most knowledgeable soil scientists currently investigating Texcoco in order to think with (not against) the arid, saline, subsiding soils of what we might call ‘the most misunderstood landscape in Mexico.’ Our basic intuition will be that despite its history, or perhaps because of it, Texcoco holds the key to Mexico City’s future.

This studio will trave to Mexico City where we will work in collaboration with ETH Master of Science in Landscape Architecture and UNAM Masters in Soil Science and Geology. We will travel together and have joined guest lectures, workshops, and pinups. Students will work in pairs to define a territorial strategy and then will be asked to develop specific sites in detail with optional individual work.

Canary in the Mine: A Design Foray into the Rural Habitats of Guinea-Bissau

What?
Guinea-Bissau is one of the most vulnerable countries to climate change in West Africa due to the low-lying/flat topographical conditions, low nutrient soils, and complete reliance on agriculture for food security. Compressed between two major climatic disruptions—the sea level rise from the West and the swelling of the Sahel’s desertification frontline from the Northeast—Guinea-Bissau’s landscapes and communities are in growing distress with longer dry periods, wider areas of salinized soils, and frequent wildfire events. Despite Guinea-Bissau’s vulnerabilities, the country owns a very long and complex history associated with the establishment of rice domestication in West Africa, the early epicenter of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, the combination of multiple ethnic groups (Muslim, Animistic, etc.) and their traditional knowledge on landscape management, building techniques, musical traditions (ex: Kora), and customary use of plants for medicinal uses. These domains, and their potentials, are still poorly understood worldwide—particularly, their role in promoting cultural and food sovereignty, securing physical and spiritual well-being, and generating strategies for territorial resiliency.

How?
The Option Studio Canary in the Mine: A Design Foray into the Rural Habitat of Guinea-Bissau in West Africa follows ongoing research focused on vulnerable communities and rural territories in which ongoing climatic disintegration paired with unbalanced ecological reciprocities—a result of global markets and/or colonial practices—have amplified social and environmental decline. Amongst these are food insecurity, wildfire occurrences, flood events, and ecological degradation. In these contexts, climatic mitigation also means medicine and traditional practices, food security and ecological stewardship, local culture protection and community life. Therefore, the Studio examines the foundational idea of HABITAT i.e., the reciprocities established between communities and natural resources in support of food systems, sustainable construction, increased resiliency, and eco-cultural stewardship through traditional ecological knowledge (TEK). The research and design work focuses on three relational props:
   1. Cultural practices, including the use of the natural elements (water, fire, soil and air) as catalytic elements in various social-ecological practices shared by the various ethnic groups in Guinea-Bissau;
   2. Traditional Residential Unit, as the built expression of the relationship between natural resources, landscape management, and traditional building techniques for thermal optimization;
   3. Community Forests and co-management practices as means for community and biodiversity protection, economic sovereignty, and spiritual well-being.
 
The Option studio collaborates closely with a local NGO (KAFO) and 3 villages/ communities in the North-eastern region of the country, Oio: Nemanaco, Bironki, and Indamikunda. The Studio aims at producing a series of potential projects and spatial choreographies for possible futures. This work will be aligned with local desires and follows the reciprocities between the communities with their natural environment, where notions of ecological stewardship align with traditional knowledge and concepts of sacredness.

Sponsored student travel to Guinea-Bissau with the local NGO will occur in September during the Studio Trip week.