The Intelligent Wasteland
There are two proposed pathways throughout the site, one that is elevated and extends along the furgary shacks, while another is embedded within the marsh and emerges for discovery at low tide. The shacks will largely be stabilized and preserved, while some will decay.
Two paths and constructed fish habitats that phase from low tide to high tide to future flooding and sea level rise
A Cybernetic Landscape
ARCH 402
Professor Cathryn Dwyre
This project looks to a hybrid understanding of landscape within an intelligent wasteland in response to the Picturesque style, a landscape approach that has often been favored throughout history due to its appearance of stabilizing, maintaining, and mastering nature for human occupation. The concept of wasteland seeks to find the fine line between horror and sublimity of landscape scenes.
There has been a common misconception in regards to the picturesque aesthetic, using it to describe quaintness. Rather, it is more properly characterized by impurity, discontinuity, decay, multiple temporal consciousness, age and a new form of wildness. It is experienced through wastelands and contaminated sites, while visually representing the largely invisible, toxic and a-formal realities that characterize these landscapes. This project seeks to initiate multiple temporalities, by engaging in preservation, restoration and low-impact development, while seeking to define a toxic digital landscape as a new reality resulting from environmental degradation at the hands of humans.
Point cloud models as a new way of understanding and representing landscape can help to extract vital embedded information to guide towards a design that preserves the entropy within a system presented through the lense of the machine. The use of data and information helps to understand the dialectic between technology and nature within these provisional landscapes, creating a new aesthetic hybrid within Hudson’s North Bay system, what I am calling an intelligent wasteland.