LAN3016Y F
Instructor(s): Aisling O'Carroll
Meeting Section: L9103
Synchronous
Tuesday, 9:00am - 1:00pm, 2:00pm - 6:00pm

The aim of this studio is to explore reconstruction as a design tool for interrogating historical narratives. In the context of increasing environmental instability and a rapidly changing climate, most design responses are aimed at solutions-based approaches to ameliorating or remedying identified crises. While this remains a very necessary ongoing effort, this studio explores an alternative response by acknowledging and exploring landscape and nature as historical and cultural concepts. Together we will examine the ideas that we have inherited and that continue to shape our ways of seeing and engaging with landscape today. This proposition suggests a more fundamental reframing of our perception of nature in order to enable radically new future engagements. As environmental historian Jason Moore writes, our environmental condition and our way of seeing it, is historically produced: “Nature is not ‘just there.’ It is historical.” Together, we will explore how this way of working might expand our definitions of these fields and concepts, and likewise our ways of seeing and understanding the relationships between people, our natural and built environments, and the current crises we face today.

The studio will focus on the Alps: a landscape that has been constructed and reconstructed repeatedly throughout history — through political power, romantic novels, geological forces, artistic representations, and physical construction. As glaciers retreat, the mountain landscape again becomes a fixation in cultural and social awareness as a vulnerable harbinger of climate change. Together, we will reconstruct a plurality of conceptions and histories of the Alps in order to explore how this re-articulation and expansion of the site might inform new ways of thinking and imagining its future and our engagement with it as designers today.

AISLING O’CARROLL is a registered landscape architect, trained in both architecture and landscape architecture. She is currently completing her PhD in Architectural Design at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. Her work addresses the relationship between history, narrative, and representation in architecture, landscape, geology and hybrids of the three—examining, in particular, critical approaches to reconstruction in design. She has previously taught design studios at Harvard Graduate School of Design and The Bartlett School of Architecture and has practiced internationally for several years with design firms and research platforms. She is co-founder and co-editor in chief of The Site Magazine.