This advanced graduate studio developed individual projects proposed by students at the end of a fall term research seminar. The projects consider the idea of NATURE as a cultural product of landscape architecture. Conducted as experiments in making nature, the projects situate socialized, biodiverse processes involved in this production as representational discourses and practices of Landscape Architecture. Palik’s Waterfront | Waterway presents an unconventional interpretation of landscape architecture’s role in producing nature. The project focuses on subjective perceptions and mappings of places rather than their physical restructuring, in this case a collection of sites composing the Duwamish River Superfund Clean-up project in Seattle, Washington. Already designed by the U.S. EPA and other agencies, the Superfund project regulates dredging of contaminated sediments in the river – and relocation of the dredged sediment to other land/water sites “outside†Seattle. Palik proposes barge tours of the Superfund sites to navigate their interwoven histories, and the diverse forms and species of agency responsible for their creation. Palik envisions tour participants collecting specimens and artifacts of these different histories and agencies, to be congealed in glycerin soaps. A website portraying the petridish molded soaps would virtually embody the river’s regulated cleansing, a less than pure process.
