- Landing: body, site, material
- Author
- RISD MLA Thesis
“Landing: body, site, material” delves into the interconnectedness of bodies, materials, and territories within landscape architecture, emphasizing their situated and performative dimensions. Employing an interdisciplinary method involving on-site immersion, this work views architecture as the embodiment of forces, energies, and materials shaped by a complex interplay of human and nonhuman agencies. By embracing the material world as a dynamic flow of energies and highlighting the intra-actions between our bodies and the land, this research contributes to the dialogue of true sustainability.
The method called “Landing” is developed as a research and design tool in landscape architectural practices, focusing on creating responsive architecture that symbiotically engages with the land. This research bridges the gap for designers working in new places by exploring how to grasp a place's rhythms and establish sustainable, interconnected designs. Drawing from personal experiences as a migrant navigating diverse lands and cultures, a rhizomatic and trans-scalar approach is adopted. "Landing" emerges as a means to intimately connect with a foreign land, redefining the body as a site and material resonating with the landscape's active forces. Through recorded embodied actions, latent processes on the land are comprehended. Material explorations employing clay, glass, textiles, plaster, and experiential drawings consider time as a fundamental tangible element at every stage of the method.
- Embodied actions
- Where does my body ends
- and the land begins?
Recording on-site immersive actions to understand the external forces impacting my body and examining the forces that my body is exerting on the site.
Breathing with the salt marsh, 2024
(Breathing in [color, sound; 04:30 min]; Breathing out [color, sound; 05:30 min])
RISD Grad show 24
- Material explorations
- Noun to verbs:
- translating embodied actions
- into material explorations
With the information decoded from the videos, I translate them into drawings and arti- facts, enabling a deeper exploration of these interactions. That moment of connection be- tween my body, material, and the site is translatable iexplorations.
Low-tide sculpture: Textiles dipped in marsh peat, water, and New England clay [Handmade cotton gauze from Chaco, Argentina; Industrial cotton gauze from United States]; Shared Breath [Four blown glass pieces]; Physical Salt Marsh map [Eight birch plywood boards with soil mixture containing varying proportions of sand, soil, water from the salt marsh]
- Responsive architecture
- Translating verbs into
- architectural technical
- performancES
Embodied architecture
Spaces capable of evolving and adapting to the changing conditions of a landscape, that can build resilience on the site.