Geographies: Urbanism in Amphibious Territoriesa
Event: Hydrogeographies Lunch Lecture
Time & Date: 12:00-2:00 CCA SF Boardroom, 10/01/12
Moderation: Christopher Roach, Sandra Vivanco, Lalo Zylberberg
Water has become a pervasive fascination among the design disciplines, an important subtext for architecture pedagogy, and an urgent topic for numerous symposia, research labs, and design competitions.
Why is this? Beyond its obvious ties to an amplified environmental consciousness, as well as its looming geopolitical significance, what is it about water that excites designers? Water is multi-scalar, spanning the spatial limits of architecture, city, and geography, as well as crossing political, administrative, and disciplinary boundaries. It’s also a process, a system, and a generator of atmospheric and morphological effects. Water urges designers into a discourse with the general public that underscores the links between the built environment and a world of increasing scarcity, the power imbalance this generates, and the potential for ecological instability at the global scale. Panelists will wade into this aqueous terrain, delving into why water has become so critical to our discourse, what it represents for the design fields. Panelists will briefly present their own research or projects on water, opening up a more specific inquiry into the impacts that architecture and urbanization have on water resources, as well as investigating the performative and formal possibilities of water in architecture, landscape, and urban design.