Terrafluxus

Design Studio V, Fall 2024: Andrew Madl. Collaboration with Joseph Hanlon.

The studio asked the students to explore and speculate on the implementation of speculative infrastructures into the fabric of Memphis, intending the infrastructures to act as agents in activating novel potential for social, economic, and ecological geographies.

Our project proposes a new form of river infrastructure embedded in a new choreography of river management, generating new paradigms of infrastructure and public space. This veritable tabula rasa of sediment, public space, and infrastructure suggests a more plastic conception of operating and playing in a future of hydrologic extremes. Surviving the crucible of uncertain climate futures will require the building of constituencies among infrastructural and cultural agents like the United Army Corps of Engineers and the Memphis River Parks Partnership, the destabilizing of static paradigms of river engineering, and the constant prototyping of new infrastructural and social landscapes.