ECOLOGIES OF REPAIR

Water is life. Mní Wičóni.

When the glaciers retreated, the land which is now the Midwest of the United

States was left with a network of connected water bodies and fertile soil. The appeal of these resources brought settlers West and shaped the landscape into our familiar agrarian grid. The rivers, streams, and vast expanses of relatively flat land which ferried crops to markets and settlers to homesteads, now transport nitrates in fertilizer runoff to the Gulf of Mexico, and shale oil from the Northern Dakotas to the Pakota Oil Terminal. Any Green New Deal, or transformational climate policy, would need to seriously address this toxic transit system, finally heeding the call from Standing Rock, “Water is life. Mní Wičóni.”

Agenda

Designers have a history of engaging with ecological issues through technological innovation, design solutionism and picturesque aesthetics. The design professions, and their longstanding techno-pastoral fantasies, appear incapable of operating outside of an essentially western and entrepreneurial imaginary, even in the face of the existential crises that currently confront it. Informed by the proposals set out in the Green New Deal, this studio seeks to approach this existential climate crisis through alternative practices of care, maintenance and repair.

Focused on the historical, environmental and geological conditions of Iowa, we will explore the question of how to respond to the troubled legacy of the occupation and settlement of the land, the toxic consequences of its agricultural and industrial transformation, and the prospects for its socially equitable and ecologically viable remediation. Rethinking normative design approaches to environmental issues in the process, the studio will situate the standard discourse of site and project in relation to broader historical, geopolitical, materialist, queer, and decolonial perspectives. We will critically reflect on the representational apparatus of architecture and explore how this might be repurposed to ends other than those of anxiety-assuaging fantasies and the production of purely economic value.

The studio will adopt a multidisciplinary approach and our proposals will be focused on the notoriously toxic and water polluting site of the DICO plant in Des Moines, recently purchased for development by the city.