Atmosphere 15_LAND +
02 – 04 February 2023
How do we understand land in the 21st century? This interdisciplinary symposium will focus on land+, examining relationships between cultural and natural systems in the design of our built environments. The goal is to advance our understanding of land through intersecting themes of story/ community, digital/ virtual, migration/ displacement, nationhood/ identity, learning/ teaching, measure/ material, and relationship.
We look forward to sharing ideas predicated on a deeper understanding of the forces causally linked with land, and those connected with past and future notions of settlement, living with and on the land.
We strive to define future relationships to land and how we design with it. We reflect on past conceptions of land in architecture, city planning, environmental design, interior design, landscape architecture, and education. Poetically speaking, we want to create unique and compelling places to engage land and life based on the fusion of various novel and unforeseen programs, desires, and contexts. Purposefully speaking, we want to posit resilient solutions that respond positively to working with clients and land at multiple scales, settings, and conditions. We negotiate climate change, pandemics, wars, and attempts to reconcile and decolonize our understanding of relationships with others in the Anthropocene. How does this influence our understanding of the land?
The land’s physical properties and phenomenological characteristics determine and figure in all forms of spatial occupation of all living systems. Land has been objectified, commodified, and treated as a blank slate. It is the inert site of resource extraction, new construction, and waste removal. The Anthropocene illustrates new geologies, ecosystems and climates arising from our actions. Land is made and remade by natural and artificial forces. The modernist project for which the Faculty of Architecture is renowned objectified land and embraced interpretations of land as a commodity to be used and improved. In the 1960s, a curiosity by Dean John A. Russell and others to understand land in all its facets led to numerous visits from Ian McHarg, one of the most influential environmental design theorists and landscape architects. McHarg’s contribution to forming a new program in landscape architecture embraced fieldwork and collaboration with scientists across the university. The program of landscape architecture celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2022-2023. Has the focus on land impacted teaching across the Faculty? How do we think of the land in our design work? Land impacts our atmosphere and our earth’s surface. In all its forms, land occupies our sense of being and place in both tangible and imagined ways – it is vital and transformative, and we impact the land, shaping and reconstructing it. The land is contested and is subject to extraction, depletion, access, and control. It is also the site of creation, resurgence, and reconciliation. The land is the stage for all life, design, and systems. We seek to understand the land and our determined place on the planet while recognizing that land is both a private and a common shared resource.
From a presentation by Ms. Jeannette C. Armstrong
to the International Expert Group Meeting, Indigenous Peoples: Development with Culture and Identity Articles 3 and 32 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (New York, 12 – 14 January 2010)
“Paula Gunn Allen, a Native American writer, provides greater clarity in her description of that relationship, in her statement that “The land … is not the ever-present “Other” which supplies us with a sense of “I”. It is rather a part of our being … It is ourselves … it not a matter of being “close to nature”. (Henderson, 409) Melissa Nelson, in the introduction of Original Instructions: Indigenous Teachings for a Sustainable Future, states, “In this sense, our biological and psychological space is a communal ground, a commons … we cannot be separated from these places. The bones and blood of our ancestors have become the soil, the soil grows our food, the food nourishes our bodies, and we become one, literally and metaphorically, with our homelands and territories.” (Nelson, 10 08)”
https://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/documents/jeanette-armstrong.pdf
We are interested in the measures and facets of spatial occupation – how land informs and impacts all scales of habitation, including policies, territories, landscapes, settlements, infrastructure, buildings, interiors, and objects. Land ‘operates’ with dynamic geometries and organizations; it privileges fractal rather than Euclidian orders. It is adaptable and elastic, and it is multivalent. How does our relationship with the land impact our experiences? How does the land impact our ideas of utility as designers and design educators? The land is more than property. Atmosphere is inescapably related to the conditions and context of land – it is the arena for mediation between culture and nature.