She spoke about the ways to implement green infrastructure in a playground, as well as how to ensure a playground is safe. She also touched on her experience as a landscape architect, how she has worked with students in designing playgrounds before, and more!
In what ways might architecture participate within its environment (with reciprocity)? In what forms might it take? How will it behave?
Bound up in architecture are the intersections of countless energetic forces: from the rich, living matter of soil, underground water flows, wind, root networks, atmospheric pressures, alongside human imagination, cultural dialogue, and technological innovation - architecture binds these things together underfoot, around, or inside itself. Rather than acting as a "pebble in the stream," or something inert watching other living forces pass it by, what could emerge if architecture took part in its surroundings directly, actively, or energetically?
Plants, one of the many living organisms connected to soil, exchange energy, information, and materials between the underground and the atmosphere. Can architecture likewise participate in these energetic and chemical exchanges and transmissions? How can architecture, and its associated assemblages, interact with biological and ecological exchange at different scales? What would it mean for architecture to become intimately connected to its environment?
This lecture will build upon my pursuits of this thesis, also known as Reciprocal Systems, by sharing examples of projects that embody possible landscape and architectural responses to these questions. Many of the projects question and critique western landscape practice's predominant focus on utility, durability, and distance as determinants of environmental organization. As a result, humans have been segregated from natural systems, converting what was once inter-species caretaking to minimally engaged kinds of maintenance. The Reciprocal Systems thesis, aims to reintroduce human engagement within unique ecologies and environments and model positive human intervention, involving the curation of new rituals that result in daily engagements with and observations of natural systems. Projects from the first installment of Reciprocal Systems, during the Spring of 2022, range from a methane heat dissipation landscape controlled by the input of indigenous plants, to architecturally-scaled rainwater catchment structures offering an artificial hydrological lifeline to species at the edges of an evaporating lake. As a group, these projects begin to reimagine how we might consider architecture as an active participant within its surroundings, chemically and biologically adapted to its surrounding environment at different scales and mediums.