Students must engage the landscape through a series of visits. In these trips, they go through a process of emotional reaction, preliminary understanding, and a naive fluency of how the landscape works.
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After a reading of the climate, soils, geomorphology, and flora/fauna, the students pick a critical landscape process. They will design to reveal this process to a user making a one-day visit to the site.
After process identification, students must study it on site - where is it located? What does it look like on the ground, and how does it work locally?
In this project, Jesus Diaz identifies the process of seed deposition in washes as his process. His observatory will be put into the wash and be part of the seed deposition process. He uses construction types possible in this remote and volatile setting.
In addition to modeling the revelation of the process by the design, students must model what a twenty-four hour visit would entail. This makes them engage in thinking about scale, comfort, sleeping, eating and bathing. How can those be accomplished in this context? Design becomes a function of resources, and time. Sometimes, in the desert climate, one may adapt to a different living cycle, such as sleeping in the heat of the day. This gives them critical perspective on the accepted norms of their lives.
Finally, with an attention to appropriate construction types, and scale, and things like water harvesting, students must grapple with material detailing. How is it built? In this project, Jesus cuts holes in the skin of the structure. Different species' seeds are placed within the holes of the structure and shielded from potential animal harvest. However, they are detailed to flow out during different flood events. The species distribution downstream will reveal what levels of flooding occurred within the wash.