Acid ecologies : or the secret lives of Spanish tomatoes/

This thesis seeks to unpack the nature of ecology within architecture, not as a neutral science, but a legitimizing construct, building a future and transforming the ethics of the present towards very deliberate ideological ends, and contingent on certain practices of alienation which themselves have historically laid the groundwork for later environmental and social crisis. The thesis asks the question, what do we mean when we call an architecture ecological, and what sort of reality are we advocating within that practice. The project is not staged explicitly as a critique of ecology, but rather a challenge to the overwhelming neutrality with which the ecological project is entertained within architectural discourses, under the premise that an ecological awareness must first entail an awareness of the means by which ecology constructs unreal realities in order to work for us. The project takes place in Almeria Spain, which in the last forty-five years has gone from the poorest region in Spain to one of the richest, through the wide scale application of greenhouse urbanism. Almeria is currently the largest intensive agriculture site in the world (80,000acres) and supplies the majority of winter produce to Europe. But Almeria is also, in many ways, an accelerated microcosm of larger contemporary ecological paradigms, what Keller Easterling called an autonomous world, Almeria is a place in which the apparent neutrality of ecological ideologies are consistently leveraged towards technological transformations of the landscape precipitating widespread environmental and social fallout conditions. In Almeria, Ecological ideologies consistently serve as the legitimizing platforms by which transformation after transformation (each promising an ideal future) compound the effects of peripheral disaster all under the guise of a seemingly neutral science. The thesis argues that within a condition in which neutral ecology is leveraged to legitimize specific ideological and economic positions, it may actually be the task of an ecological architecture to irrigate radical alternatives, not as ideal futures, but as provisional presents, alternate ecological life rafts within contested environmental conditions. This thesis proposes one such alternate present. It interjects itself within the most recent technoecological shift from chemically applied agricultural practices which are rapidly being replaced with the promise of a genetically engineered future, a 'clean' Almeria in the wake of widespread chemical fallout. The alternative is formed from a seemingly simple question, what if we merely doubt that Almeria's genetic turn won't precipitate alternate forms of fallout equal to its chemically contested state.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Architecture.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2012

Author dc:creator

• Roth, Curtis (Curtis A.)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Ana Miljački.

• Architecture.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about 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/1721.1/70379

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/70379