Aquacultures

The final first semester project explores scale, temporality, and processes of landscape through the spatial, formal, and programmatic possibilities of a plastic and glue model superimposed on a given site and activated with the operating word, ‘cultivation.’

This project proposes a multifaceted waterscape that harnesses the cultivating potentials of water to examine public perception of and engagement with our contemporary hydro-scapes through aesthetics, production, and recreation. The site is comprised of a network of ponds, pools, and water-logged surfaces, each with its own character and function. Four primary water types compose this aqueous quilt: habitat, toxic, playful, and productive.

At a deeper level, this site challenges binaries of good and bad, green and brown, toxic and clean. Though the site is intended to cause reflection on the consequences of our actions in the world, it is not attempting to moralize one waterscape above another. Rather, it seeks to investigate the relation of man-made aquatic and aquacultural conditions to each other and to ourselves. Embodied experience of these dissonant conditions emphasizes the resilience of each of the sections, the natural, the toxic, the productive and the recreational, and of their creators. Confronting the pleasure of play with the repugnance of pollution invites consideration of our species’ survival in the spaces in between the utopias and dystopias of our own making.