THE EARTH AND HER ROOTS:
Above + Below Place-Thought

Master’s Thesis

Term:

M.Arch Thesis 2021 

 

Advisor:

Zachary Colbert 

 

Location: 

Odawa, Turtle Island

 

Publication: 

CURVE

 

 

Change Order 0.1 / Abstract

 

Earth as a paradigm for architecture questions languages of design drawing/thinking. Studying Odawa pastures’ potential to challenge national building codes and worldviews revealed the return of repressed design processes made of metaphysical, cosmological, and socio-political strings woven from rhythm and movement in hybrid realities. A proposal to unify agriculture/architecture policy, pedagogy, and practice through product/labour creation manifests in liminal negotiations within residential building envelopes surrounding the Tunney’s Pasture post-war government campus.

 

Speculative fabulation/feminism and radical Indigenism support intersectional justice by working with architectural methodologies founded on nondualism. Advocacy for ancestral practices, neo-materialism, Place-Thought, and care-work expands ontologies centered on unity to unsettle Archi-tecture’s dualisms. Adopting a transcendent viewpoint towards polarities dissolves the boundaries of Earth/Architecture across time, scale, space, and the pluriverse. Flowing between ways of knowing/being presents growing(++), harvesting(-+), living(- -), and rooting(+-) into geo-cycles through archetypal mythologies of place, culture, bodies, and folds.

Change Order 0.2 / 

Glossary 

 

Blackfoot Dictionary /

Algonquin Dictionaries Project

 

Architect =

Nature = good natured

Earth = Earth, dirt, land ksááhko ni   personified ksaahkomm na

Home = a day midway between summer solstice + winter solstice aahkiáapiksistsiko ni

 

 Place-Thought

An Indigenous philosophy:

the earth is alive and thinking

humans and non-humans

derive agency from the land

Vanessa Watts. (2013). Indigenous Place-Thought & Agency amongst humans and non-humans (First Woman and Sky Woman go on a European World Tour!). Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education + Society, Vol 2. No 1, 21.

 

EMBODIED ENERGY = 1/3 of global carbon emissions, energy consumption  + waste1 OR a soul

UN: material extraction causes 90% of global biodiversity loss, 90% of global water stress and 50% of global greenhouse gas emissions 2

Philosophy.

Transcending Duality

Methodology.

Language of Circles

Process.

Seeing Through Soil

Site.

Earth Bodies / Pastures

Government Campus

National Policy

Proposal.

Design Orientations

Methodological Compass

Healing Building Envelopes

Growing (++)

Harvesting (-+)

Living (- -)

Rooting (+-)

Earth Chrysalis + String Figures