These drawings describe a Great Lakes dune chronograph, a landscape designed to track change over 1,800 years through ecological and technological interventions atop a shifting terrain. Vaults embedded in the landscape archive or disperse collections of seeds, preserving existing species and releasing others in a programmed response to changes in the site ecology. A fleet of networked strandbeest machines direct seed dispersal, record climate and site condition data, and perform surface maintenance. Shifts in the on-site plant community and the exposure or burying of site infrastructure also track changes across the span of the design. Terra, Adapta was the last phase of the Terra Mutare project in the second half of Kristi Cheramie’s first year studio. Students began by developing annotations for tracking changes in terrain conditions, where the terrain was a 1”x1” area on their hand. Midway through the project, students exchanged sites and documents and began designing atop another student’s hand terrain. Designs began with thorough investigations of the terrain conditions, continued with plant community selection and climate change projections, and concluded with the landscape chronograph.
