Our design brief for this project was to create a chronograph, a way of celebrating and recording change in the landscape.
We started with a 1” square site selected on our hand or foot – in my case, the inside of my left ankle. We studied the site through six phases of motion and created hybrid drawings as well as 4” square plan and section drawings. Those studies were then scaled up again to a 24” square plan drawing of our site combining all 6 phases of motion into a detailed construction drawing. These construction drawings were then shuffled around our cohort, and for part two of this project, we had to interpret someone else’s construction drawings and turn those into a 240’ square landscape with 500 years of geological history. We created initial study drawings and a physical model of the site, and then refined those drawings.
I decided to turn the drawings I received into a karst-like landscape, peppered with sinkholes that are on the verge of collapse into an underground cavern. For the final phase of the project, we had to imagine 500 years into the future, and a group of landscape architects, climatologists, geomorphologists, and photographers coming to this site to study it. We then designed an intervention that enables them to do research and serves as a chronograph that engages and celebrates change over time. My design involves growing bamboo on the surface of the site and turning it into flexible and adaptable scaffolding that would support the cavern and provide access and research space. This would slow the collapse of the cavern and allow the researchers to access and study the terrain to use it as a proxy for Earth climate systems. As the bamboo needs to be maintained and replaced, the form of the scaffolding would constantly shift and respond to the changing cavern, highlighting the slow changes occurring. All of this is being documented and surveyed by the photographer, who will create a record of how the bamboo and cavern systems adapt and change over time. I also chose to take a more photographic/collage style for my renderings to reflect this photographer’s view of the site.
Ultimately the goal of the project was to create a site that invited the researchers to explore deeper, and to frame the slow changes occurring in this strange terrain.
