Studio Brief:

“Agridisastropia,” a term invented as an impetus for this studio, extracts and combines notions of agriculture, disaster, and utopia. “Agriculture,” from the Greek ager ‘field’ + cultura ‘growing’ refers to the cultivation of soil, raising of livestock, and in varying degrees the preparation and marketing of resulting products. It includes processes of plowing, sowing, manuring, irrigation, weeding, harvesting, storage, transportation, and sales. The etymology of the word “disaster,” from the Greek dis ‘bad’ + astro ‘star,’ reveals the human tendency to believe that massive calamities occur as the result of forces larger than ourselves (e.g. ill-fated astrological alignments, acts of God, freak accidents). The studio rejects this notion of victimhood and insists that there is no such thing as “natural” disaster, only planning, policy, and design disasters caused by bad human ideas; furthermore, the studio posits that “nature” is an anti-ecological Romantic construct which separates human and non-humans, with disastrous results. The word “utopia,” from the Greek ou ‘no’ + topos ‘place, was first used by Thomas More in 1516 to describe a place of ideal socioenvironmental conditions, a fictional island of perfection that could never really exist. Rematriation is an idea which pushes back against the heteropatriarchal underpinnings of the term repatriation and calls for a way of thinking about land through the lens of indigenous feminism. Contrary to the common understanding of machines as necessarily mechanical or metallic, the studio engages the notion of machinic as a materiality of component parts, natural or artificial, and both simultaneously; it is matter in movement, in flux, in variation, matter as a conveyor of singularities and traits of expression. The megamachinic landscape absorbs myriad living and non-living entities into its territorial componentry and thus problematizes social relations between human and non-human entities. This studio draws upon all of the above to examine the relationship between architecture, the city, and the countryside. Projects will stress analysis and interpretation of the diverse forces and conditions that impact and inform architecture in the urban / rural environment.

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Structure:

The studio unfolds in three acts, each act performed in troupes of three students. Act One consists of travel and research related to constructing narrative histories of Iowa’s agricultural industry and its impact on the state’s watersheds; we witness the displacement of indigenous environmental stewardship with settler colonial notions of economic growth and the incremental impact which soy, pork, and corn production had on the socioenvironmental dynamics of the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico. Act Two develops a toolkit for rematriating Iowa’s machinic landscape into new ethico-aeshetic paradigms; our work will be arranged along the three ecological registers of the environment, social relations and human subjectivity. Act Three instantiates scalable prototypes from Act Two’s toolkit into Iowa’s Superfund sites (i.e. scenes of ecocide), with an emphasis on cultivating regenerative feral futurities and post-capitalistic urban imaginaries. Studio sessions will be punctuated by intensive workshops with an emphasis on critical cartography and digital/analog fabrication using GIS, Grasshopper, and on-campus wood/metal shops. While prior knowledge of these methods is not required, students that enroll in this studio should have an interest for and aptitude in learning advanced digital computation and large-scale physical model construction.

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Field Trip:

The field trip is tentatively scheduled from 03/06/24 - 3/10/24. We will take a one-way road trip that follows the Mississippi River downstream from Iowa to the Gulf of Mexico, travling southbound along the Great River Road through St. Louis, Memphis, and Vicksburg. Our final destination is New Orleans, LA, where the Mississippi River flows into the Gulf of Mexico, carrying with it enough phosphorous and nitrogen to create 3,000+ square miles of hypoxic waters. This area, known as the Dead Zone, is larger in size than the State of Delaware and threatens seafood production, recreation, and marine life on a planetary scale. In addition to visiting contemporary river cities, we will investigate ancient and indigenous examples of riparian urbanism including Effigy Mounds National Monument, Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, Poverty Point World Heritage Site, and more. These sites will provide crucial insights for re-tooling our approach to living, dying, and the future of city-building in the Mississippi watershed basin.

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Course Catalog Description:

An examination of the relationship between architecture and the city. Studio projects stress analysis and interpretation of the diverse forces and conditions that impact and inform architecture in the urban environment. Urban design project. Study abroad option.