Post-Professional Master of Science, Advanced Architectural Design

BACKGROUND: FINGER LAKES FUTURES:

Long considered a region ‘time forgot’, and according to the recent census still losing population, the Finger Lakes has recently, and maybe unexpectedly, re-entered the imaginary geography of urban America. In part, this has to do with growing awareness of the displacements of indigenous populations that made European settlement possible here. It also has to do with the realization that the feedback loops from the biophysical world that modulated human-non human relations in the past have broken down, manifested in the recent pandemic that saw people fleeing large conurbations, and projections that the region will be one of the few parts of the US that will be relatively unchanged by climate change in 50 years time. This revisioning of the Finger Lakes as a ‘natural’ or ‘climate refuge’ both highlights, and calls into question, longstanding perceptions of the region as an unspoiled natural landscape of fields and forests interspersed with ancient, glacier-carved lakes.

In fact, discourses about the Finger Lakes’ ‘unspoiled nature’ have always been questionable. European settlement in the 18th C. not displaced indigenous populations who had lived in the region for centuries in sustainable ways, but radically transformed its ecology . And since the 19th C., the region has been infrastructuralised to extract and transport resources, an operationalization of rural landscape to support urbanization elsewhere that continues today. Like other peri-urban areas, the Finger Lakes is seeing a diversification of non-agricultural land uses, of which tourism (ie “the experience economy”) is only the most obvious. In Tompkins County, one example is the Bell Station site, a mostly undeveloped 472 acre tract originally intended in the 1970s for a nuclear power plant, and recently slated for sale. The last minute cancellation of this sale due to public pressure and state intervention gained a reprieve from a data mining center cooled by lake water, and dozens of second homes, and retained extensive natural areas and public access to Cayuga Lake (whose frontage is currently 90% privately owned). Even the most optimistic scenarios for the site’s future include extensive solar farms that capitalize on existing high power lines from the enormous mothballed coal-fired power plant immediately to the south, whose legacy includes a large, potentially toxic, coal ash pile.

TOWARDS an ‘ANTHROPOCENE TEMPORALITY’?

The Bell Station site reveals how the ‘rural and ‘urban’ have become entangled in the Finger Lakes region, and exemplifies the pressures and dilemmas, as well as tensions between the local and the non-local, likely to emerge as non-urban landscapes are transformed to accomplish a low carbon future. These pressures also call into question the continuing usefulness of scenographic perceptions of ‘nature as landscape’ which help people cope with social and environmental change, but also, according to some, restrict our ability to navigate environmental change. Objectifying ‘nature as landscape’ obscures the fact that any conception of nature is both a cultural construct and a set of physical facts, and that all physical landscapes are in a constant state of becoming. And because they originate in human subjectivity, such constructions tend to mediate discourses privileging untrammeled, and pre-modern and pre-colonial modes of life. However well-intentioned, such nostalgic and declinist discourses of nature mediate a teleological time-consciousness, a culturally ingrained model of history-as-linear-progress that influences how we think about society, politics and the environment, as well as what kinds of change we think are or are not possible. This time consciousness not only ignores the impossibility of ‘turning back the ecological clock in many parts of the world disturbed by human action, but also the social potentials of emergent landscape typologies and neo-ecologies in which human and nonhuman agency are differently calibrated from the past. This time-consciousness is also profoundly challenged by the Anthropocene position which emphasizes “humans live within a geologically and meteorologically scaled theater impacted by their presence”, and that we can no longer sustain the illusion that our lives and actions are separate from biophysical world.

Multiple questions stem from this Anthropocene recalibration of culture and nature: whose, or what, cultural values, and what environmental processes, should prevail when designing for the future? If climate change is irreversible and widely acknowledge, how do we reconcile cultural imaginaries of ‘nature’ as something durable with the need to protect it from our own actions? How can designers of buildings and landscapes address feelings of existential dread and intergenerational distrust through programming, design and construction? In an era of mediated ecological anxiety disorder (EAD), can design go beyond simply addressing socio-technical performances oriented towards carbon neutrality, and generate affects that translate into globally-oriented environmental action? One possibility is modes of designing that approach the world we inhabit as an environment ie. “the biophysical totality of actants (including human subjects) as well as the performances and interactions linking them”. This invites a less teleological environmentality that flattens human-nonhuman hierarchies, and “unsettles the narrative foundations that stabilize landscape and block reflections on alternative futures/future change”. Emphasizing space-times (and time-scales) environment beyond the present can generate “anticipatory histories” that problematize a taken-for-granted orientation to the past, and prepare inhabitants for the future. It also suggests an alternative environmental aesthetics based on a ‘history without chronology’, embracing the slow, non-purposive agencies of the non-human realm, as well as its stabilizing cycles and rhythms.

Prognostications about the Finger Lakes as a ‘landscape at risk’ would seem to require sweeping, long term responses involving regional planning, environmental regulation, social and economic policy etc. and extensive uses like forestry and agriculture will clearly play a role in mitigating climate change. However, a less teleological environmentality also invites site-specific interventions that, by expanding human-environment interactions, recalibrate scenographic ways of seeing nature by suggesting non-historical resonances between past, present and future.

THE PROJECT: AIR/ENERGY/ATMOSPHERE; Environmental Observatorium

“The atmosphere is not just a space, a sphere or a moment….we might want to restore. (It) also has temporal depth; a history that can only be borne out, not to mention experienced, in its materiality. In this way, the atmosphere is a cultural object, shared across generations, each of which has the right to enjoy and the duty to preserve” – Jorge Ortero-Pailos8

“(The built environment’s) fixity is to some...extent illusory, not because it is not a real thing, but because its reality is based on its affects—the properties it exudes, which, in turn, engage people, among other beings and things.” -- Timothy Pauketat

To this end, you are asked to design a single or distributed architectural-landscape intervention, an “environmental observatorium”: an OBJECT as well as a DEVICE whose primary purpose is to index, register and/or anticipate -- render legible -- ongoing environmental change, and to do this ATMOSPHERICALLY. At a fundamental (ie planetary) level, the atmosphere is what (meteorologically) makes life on earth possible. From a human-subjective point of view, though, it is a profoundly hybrid construction, incorporating the ‘meteorological’ and the ‘physiological’ in equal measure, and as we shall see, the ‘affective’ as well. A focus on atmosphere recognizes that human environments are not just built but also grown, but continually shaped by ambient climatic conditions, their constructed as well as their naturally-occurring components assailed by the same routine meteorological actions. These diffuse ‘climatic effects’ indexthe environment’s topographical and material configuration, and reveal that both ‘materiality’ and ‘use’ are place-based but not placebound. By highlighting what goes on in the environment rather than the physical environment per se, and indexing how human intentionality and nonhuman agency become articulated, these ‘climatic effects’ also reminds us how local human-environment exchanges are shaped by seemingly non-local materialities and technologies, as well as networks of practice and knowledge. At the same time, because they are tied to how things unfold and are achieved,  these environmental effects also TEMPORALLY give rise to affects. Understood as forms of pre-reflective emotional intensity and the rising and falling of “lived power or the potential to act”, AFFECT is a matter of agential relationality that emerges through practical embodiments and interactions between and with objects and environments that, being felt as much as seen, is innately “atmospheric”. Scoring the (corporeal, more-than representational) fluxes of atmospheric experience means bracketing conventional architectural conceptions of space as a psycho-experiential construct, and focusing on the heterogeneous performances, interactions and affects generated and awakened by the project.

The observatorium’s brief of challenging discourses of ‘nature as landscape’ through the entanglement of the material and affective will be underscored by the sites selected. Both highlight a central fact of anthropogenic climate change: that changes in the planet’s atmosphere are ultimately the result of expenditure of energy (usually carbon-based) that, following the law of thermodynamics, simultaneously reduces available energy and increases environmental entropy. The common denominator linking energy and atmosphere is of course AIR, the’ invisible’ medium through which the byproducts (ie pollution) as well as the atmospheric e/affects (heat, humidity, coolth, and light) of energy expenditure are registered.  The challenge is to exploit air’s multi-valent materiality and temporality to create a landscape/architectural intervention whose (temporal) ‘becoming’ is ‘atmospheric’. Following David Leatherbarrow’s tripartite categorization of ‘building time’, the temporalities mediated by your intervention could include the time of the world; the time of the body; and the time of the project.  Materially, these temporalities could index: hydrological, meteorological (and maybe also geological and botanical ) processes; technological, scientific and economic histories; and sensorial, affective transpersonal and potentially intergenerational understandings awakened by lived encounters in and with the site. Your intervention could appropriate, modify and transform existing site components (topography, soils, water, plants, manmade structures etc) , or it could take the form of an entirely alien (but site specific) device. 

Given the focus on atmosphere as something both felt and seen, it will also highlight interactions between humans and non-human beings that are created (temporally) by meteorological phenomena (rain, sun, wind, snow etc). The ‘environmental awareness’ created and/or curated by your observatorium should be both air-born (ie. generated via the materiality and/or performances of air) and air-borne (ie. disseminated, felt or awakened by air). As Silvia Beneditto argues spaces can be constructed using atmosphere as a design medium – for instance, as immersive journey, as thermal threshold, as program, as shared situation and as thermal contrast.13 Design decisions (or scoring) contributing to this spatial/atmospheric patterning could involve: siting; layout; construction; materiality; visual scenography (local/regional); microclimate (heat/humidity/air movement); light/dark (natural artificial); sensorial performance (haptic/aural/olfactory): media (coding/embedded); use/(cross)programming/participation etc. If you like, this atmospheric patterning can be anchored by a nominal program for your observatorium ie: ‘archive of the present future’ (per Emily Eliza Scott); an ‘experimental history’ (per David Gissen) that reconstructs past landscape intelligences (including indigenous ones); an ‘experimental preservation’ project (per Jorge Ortero Pailos); or an ‘evolutionary infrastructure’ (per Weiss & Manfredi).

Rather than overhaul or ‘fix’ the site, these interventions should combine existing environmental performances with emergent systems (practices, technologies etc) to catalyze a new public realm. In addition to atmospherically engaging the site’s terrestrial/airborne materialities and visual topographies, your observatorium could also have conventional enclosed interpretive spaces, and exterior space for temporary events and gatherings.

Each of the possible sites represents a different moment (and scale) in the Finger Lake’s regions contingent energy history, and therefore, different opportunities to interpret material connections between energy and atmosphere. The first is the boundary between the Bell Station tract and the Cayuga Power Plant. This contains, or soon will contain, energy infrastructures, in both historic coal-based and renewable guises, normally hidden from view in rural landscapes like the Finger Lakes. The second site is the site of the Gun Hill factory, immediately adjacent to Cornell’s campus as well as Fall Creek gorge, site of earlier use of water to power the university and some of Ithaca’s early industries.14 Here the hiddenness is of a different order, indexically legible through material traces.