Anthropogenic landscapes : Owens Lake, CA

In the Age of the Anthropocene, human activities have greatly altered and transformed all aspects of the geological environment, typically extracting what is considered valuable and leaving behind degraded landscapes. Often existing in between the city and wilderness nature, these landscapes are largely forgotten and assumed to always have been like that. How can we re-engage with these landscapes and can they become a meaningful part of our culture? A prime example is Owens Lake in eastern California. It has a rich history: earliest agricultural domestication, silver and salt mining, death by a greedy neighbor far south, worst particulate matter pollution, and a surprising resurrection. Starting in the early 2000s, Owens Lake was carved up into 'cells' and a new infrastructure of pipes, roads, sensors, and dust monitoring equipment was overlaid. Each cell was re-tilled, re-watered, re-planted, or re-paved, resulting in a strange yet fascinating ecology where multiple "natures" (wild, artificial, and reconstructed) co-exist uncannily. As state-owned land, public engagement was a required part of the dust mitigation efforts. Architecture, an important contributor to anthropogenic change, offers the opportunity to re-engage with the site. Stan Allen writes that "any work of architecture is (first) a transformation of the landscape." [1] Inevitably, architecture sits on and interacts with land, is composed of materials extracted from the land, and most importantly, reorders the landscape through artificial constructs. Here, a network of architectural interventions draw people, whether casual passerby, adventure seekers, or scientific researchers, to key areas around Owens Lake to discover the human and non-human dynamics that shape this particular place and whose presence re-shape the landscape they are situated in.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Architecture.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2017

Author dc:creator

• Kao, Alice (Alice Hsuan-jung)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• James L. Wescoat Jr.

• Architecture.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/108940

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/108940