Land-Based Interventions for Climate Change Infrastructure

Team: Jessica Rossi-Mastracci, faculty lead; with Graduate Research Assistants: Torey Erin, Aubrey Olson, Marla Brown

Program: Landscape Architecture, Kusske Design Initiative (KDI)

Utilizing ‘Research Through Design’ as a primary method of exploration, this work tests ‘low-tech’ land-based infrastructures (LBI) as alternative infrastructural forms for climate change adaptation.

Utilizing ‘Research Through Design’ as a primary method of exploration, this work tests ‘low-tech’ land-based infrastructures (LBI) as alternative infrastructural forms for climate change adaptation. LBI manipulate land through simple construction techniques such as digging, landforming, and compacting, and are deployed through a legible design framework. These design interventions enhance existing ecological and hydrological processes, create new ones, support human and non-human systems, and structure landscape change across temporal and spatial scales, creating a form of resilient landscape infrastructure.

We use the embedded knowledge within these low-tech interventions as inspiration to develop alternative climate-adaptable material assemblies and landscape infrastructures through iterative drawing, digital modeling, model-making, and small-scale installations. The work collects, categorizes, and diagrams land, water, air, and fire infrastructural typologies to visualize formal and performative characteristics. We then dissected selected typologies into the simplest form(s) and components to unpack how they function on a material and formal level. We used iterative model-making and digital drawing to manipulate, thicken, adapt, explode, and otherwise alter typologies to layer functionality, temporarily, and multi-functionality, thus uncovering new possibilities. Next steps are to transform typologies in response to site-specific scenarios to test how site characteristics, adjacencies, and climate impact form.

Funders: Kusske Design Initiative (KDI)