Description
Swamps have historically represented spaces of difficulty and illegibility. Early developers, city planners, and engineers sought to create arable and profitable land by controlling and draining these wet, thick, dense, teeming, and hostile environments. Simultaneously, these landscapes have also served as sites of resistance. Protected by the undesirability and inaccessibility of the swamp, and excluded from mainstream society, maroons and Indigenous communities of the Gulf South thrived in wetland havens, developing nuanced methods of living within the bottomland.
Inhabiting the swamp alters the way one senses the environment. Equal parts land and water, made of mud, thickets, and decay, the swamp defies conventional methods of cultivation, orientation, and making meaning. At once wasteland and wildland, it represents a liminal space characterized by contradictions but also open to possibilities. Amid accelerated urban and environmental transformation, from climate risks to shifting ecological baselines, the swamp has the potential to offer a set of novel approaches to design.
This workshop, Swamp Systems, seeks to expand the discourse around swamp landscapes in design, focusing on how swamps have shaped visual culture and environmental epistemologies and exploring how complex ecological dynamics inform design research methods and shape landscape futures.
Schedule
9:30 AM Introduction
10:00 AM Swamp Lessons
- Christopher Hight, “Of Spiders and Spit”
- Kelly Presutti, “The Anti-Visual Landscape in France’s Landes de Gascogne”
- Morgan Vickers, “Bêtes Noires and Incorrigible Hell Holes: Condemning the Black Lowcountry Swamp”
12:30 PM Break
1:45 PM Swamp Methods
- Rob Holmes, “Area Subject to Frequent Change”
- Leena Cho, “Attending to Ground in Tension”
- Sonia Sobrino Ralston, “End Times: Resolution and Decay in the Data Swamp”
4:45 PM Conclusion
Participants
Leena Cho
Kinder Foundation Distinguished Chair and Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture, University of Virginia School of Architecture; Founding Director, Arctic Design Group
Leena Cho is Kinder Foundation Distinguished Chair and Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Virginia and cofounding director of Arctic Design Group. Her research and design work focus on landscapes at the frontline of climate extremes, where rapid environmental change reshapes territory, material practices, and ways of knowing. She is coeditor and author of Design and the Built Environment of the Arctic and Mediating Environments, and she coleads the multiyear traveling studio program Permafrost Futures, funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the UVA Environmental Institute, among others. Her current work investigates landscapes of scientific practices along the North Slope of Alaska.
Associate Professor, Rice School of Architecture
Christopher Hight is associate professor at the Rice School of Architecture, where he teaches graduate and undergraduate design studios and a theory seminar. His research examines the intersections of landscape, urbanism, and emerging material and electronic systems. He is the author of Architectural Principles in the Age of Cybernetics, a study of cybernetics, formalism, and postwar architectural design, and is coeditor of the AD issue “Collective Intelligence in Design.” Previously, he taught at the Architectural Association’s Design Research Laboratory in London and worked at the Renzo Piano Building Workshop. A former Fulbright Scholar, he holds a Ph.D. from the University of London, an M.A. from the Architectural Association, and a B.A. and B.Arch. from Rice University.
Rob Holmes
Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture, Auburn University
Rob Holmes is associate professor of landscape architecture at Auburn University and a member of the Dredge Research Collaborative (DRC). At Auburn, he chairs the undergraduate landscape architecture program and directs the Landscape Infrastructure Design Lab (LIDL). With the DRC, he coauthored the book Silt Sand Slurry and, since 2017, has coordinated the EWN+LA Design Research Initiative for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Engineering with Nature program. With LIDL, he is currently leading the Tidelands initiative, which is developing new forms of natural infrastructure for bays and estuaries on the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts of the United States.
Kelly Presutti
Assistant Professor of History of Art and Visual Studies, Cornell University
Kelly Presutti is assistant professor of history of art and visual studies at Cornell University. Her first book, Land into Landscape: Art, Environment, and the Making of Modern France, looks to specific landscapes and their representation as sites of negotiation and contestation between state power, local inhabitants, and the environment. A new project studies the art and object collections of the French navy, attending especially to stories of failure, weakness, and defeat to illuminate the surprising role disaster played in the formation of an imperial maritime identity.
Sonia Sobrino Ralston
Daniel Urban Kiley Teaching Fellow and Lecturer in Landscape Architecture, Harvard Graduate School of Design
Sonia Sobrino Ralston is a designer and researcher who examines the ways in which plants and information systems collide. Trained as a landscape architect and architect, her work—spanning animation, writing, and spatial design—describes how environmental knowledge has been produced, stored, and governed both historically and in emerging infrastructure, while also analyzing how these systems are entangled with labor, politics, and extraction. She was awarded the 2024 Architectural League Prize as part of Office Party and was assistant curator for the 2022 Tallinn Architecture Biennial. She is currently the Daniel Urban Kiley Teaching Fellow and Lecturer in Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Morgan P. Vickers
Assistant Professor of Race/Racialization, University of Washington
Morgan P. Vickers is assistant professor of race/racialization in the Department of Law, Societies & Justice at the University of Washington. Vickers researches swamplands, racial ecologies, twentieth-century infrastructure, and ecosocial repair. They are currently writing a book illuminating the swamplands of Lowcountry South Carolina as a geography of condemnation, a wretched ecology in the Southern imagination, a terraqueous site of struggle, and an ill-fated “wasted space” destroyed in the name of progress. Vickers has written about these themes in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Environment and Planning F, American Anthropologist, and elsewhere.
Organizer
Assistant Professor, Rice School of Architecture; Cofounder and Managing Principal, Dept.
Maggie Tsang is assistant professor at Rice School of Architecture. She is a landscape architect and architect whose research focuses on the intersection between landscape, ecology, urbanism, and infrastructure. She is cofounder and managing principal of Dept., a landscape architecture and urban design studio based in Houston whose current work spans various scales, from an experimental garden and constructed prairie at Rice University to a two-acre public park with Buffalo Bayou Partnership in Houston’s East End. Dept. was awarded the 2022 Architectural League Prize and named the 2024 “Editor’s Pick” for Best in Landscape Architecture, Southwest Region, by The Architect’s Newspaper.
Tsang was cocurator of the exhibition Big, Hot, and Sticky at the Architecture Center Houston and the principal investigator for “Community Oriented Stormwater Infrastructure,” an interdisciplinary research initiative conducted with the Rice University Departments of Civil Engineering and Sociology.
Credits
This event is generously supported by the Rice School of Architecture, Rice University Office of Research Creative Ventures Fund, and Rice University’s Arts Initiatives Fund. Graphic design by Moonsick Gang.