Fourteenth International Conference on The Constructed Environment

Abstract

Our future cities are faced with the challenge of climate change and abandoned wastelands are a byproduct of deteriorative anthropogenic activities. Our current post-anthropocentric time requires a solution that is artificial yet “relative”. This beginning of the process is the very nature of change that our post-anthropocentric time demands. It demands attention towards unused landscapes, and reorients us to look at them as salvageable lands that can evolve, grow and be embedded with technology as a curation of future landscapes. It does not require a wild takeover of nature, on the abandoned lands, but requires a gentle sculpting of the land, remolded with synthetic nature, curating it and tailoring it into a productive landscape. The research proposal of combining solar textiles as in the research of Sheila Kennedy with geotextiles as a productive surface for landscape design, proposes integration of solar energy, and creating an opportunity for hybridization of the terrain ecosystem. These two aspects merge to formulate an array of possibilities of re-framing landscape as by-products of processes of environmental ecology. Instead of static mounds, they start to become dynamic machines that exist as autonomous ecosystems of the future. The infrastructural artifact as a result of combining technology with landscape is a combination that is of residual with responsive, a relationship that is coexistent and that of dialogue. The hybrid landscape evokes a digital landscape, a speculation, a desire for the new landscape.