Terra Fluxus

By Shizheng Geng (MAUD ’21) and Youngju Kim (MAUD ’21)

Our project, ‘Terra Fluxus,’ aims to revitalize and reconstruct the cultural identity of the urban peripheral logistics campus in Westwood with two main strategies: the first one is to reverse the long-lasting process of cutting the topography of woodland to fill the wetland; the second is to amplify the capacity of wetland and industry for ephemeral events to make our site vibrant with attractive cultural identity. The title of our project is borrowed from the title of an essay by James Corner where he used this term to describe the shifting processes coursing through and across the urban field. When we compared the history photos with the current condition on our site, we found that there is a long-lasting and on-going process of cutting the topography of woodland to fill the wetland. Along with a long-term process of re-contouring, we explored the capacity of wetland and existing logistics industry. We see this seasonality and temporality as a big opportunity to hybridize nature, industry, and recreational culture in our site. This project is not about restoring nature back to its former state, but rather re-contouring to provide spaces for all the existing fluxes, that is, wetland, industry, and recreational activities, that will make our site vibrant and playful.