Celaena Riley
Syracuse University
Bachelors of Architecture
Thesis 2022
National parks are valuable sites of American culture and complex ecosystems. Rich with history and diverse flora and fauna, these parks are resilient
havens of American nature. However, these sites, and all natures, are threatened by worsening climate conditions. The West Coast’s Yosemite National Park
is cultural icon and core site of national interests in preservation. Yet it too is repeatedly challenged by fires at increasingly greater scales and extremities incurred by climate change.
This crisis will escalate, turning calculations of future devastation into permanent reality.
Advisors:
Emily Pellicano Ted Brown
most romanticize the past and present states.
Researching American national parks requires the past, present, and future. New representations are approached as mixture of the park’s factual histories and historic representations balanced with projections of the future.
Seeking imaginings of the foreign and undiscovered, artificial image productions, utilizing text- and image-to-image and style transfer technologies, offer the ability to defamiliarize the known. Designed as parafictional
Chapter I: Flora, Fields, & Facades
Chapter II: Folly in a Fervent Forest
Julia Czerniak
In response, architecture has the agency to create potent imagery, to demystify the climate crisis, rendering the danger and effects of these elemental conditions in order to evoke an emotional response and protect America’s cultural icons.
Current representations of these natures are critiqued as ineffective at connecting with audiences.
While different types of media may portray national parks with distinct intentions, such as tourism, preservation, reporting, and documentation,
atlas, image fabrication of Yosemite National Park is guided by fictional documentary narrative designed to present future projections as fact.
Visually and textually capturing the tense temporality and archived physicality of Yosemite can inform and grow emotional investment to the future of American natures.
Audiences therefore approach the familiar as foreign. Representations can translate the power of cultural icons and disasters to tangible issues commanding immediate reflection and responses.
Chapter III: Fear an d Flood in the Fo g
Chapter IV: Forms in the Fickle Flashes
Chapter V: The Finale of the Fourberie
The Scientist:
Analytical, methodological, and astutely observational, the Scientist is attuned to the “how’s” and “why’s” as they explore this unfamiliar world.
STRANGE VINES & GRASSES
The Artist:
Verbose, romantic, and empathetic, the Artist connects the Crew’s interloping to their new context, speaking their mind solely through the use of poetry.
EASY TO CUT
The Mercenary:
Anxious and especially focused on the Crew’s survival through the unknown, the Mercenary is the spatial spearhead of the group; their eyes are alert.
The Philosopher: Poetic, existential, and concept-driven, the Philosopher assists in repositioning the Crew’s human existence in this world’s hierarchy through speculation and theory.
Flora, Fields, & Facades Beginning
Violent bi-pedal creatures walked among us, murdering us. We watched as we fell to the ashen soil.
One step. Two step. Three. Metal cleaving through the brush with clean rhythm. Thistles dropped into my hands as the rest gathered in mounds at our feet. The thick needles were smooth and so sharp. Finally, the dense bushes grew sparser and sparser. An opening revealed itself to us. paused. Memories bubbled.
phase Identified by prickly, swamp-green nopales, the petals begin overgrow the stem’s capacity.
phase iv
Nopale growth dominates the whole body. These can be identified from afar by their sculptural quality.
phase ii
The blood-red hue emerges as blooming petals take bulbous forms. The stem is burdened by extraneous nopales.
phase “Roisvend enrapsa” intrude onto nearby flora. Excess secretions from “consumption” result in blinding glows from its petals.
phase iii
Petals multiply an exponential rate, erupting into large bush. Nopales continue gather as an underbrush.
phase vi
Full encapsulation results in lightless space. Unidentified noises appear echo out. They have been described as “gutteral”.
Crimson beginnings, encumber the trodden. Forgotten sinnings, evidenced, in instance, by blooming trimmings on soiled earth.
Ashen, bloody, the body lays prostrate to birth lineage of retributions, of branches of binary failures and solutions. The primal primary process repeats ad infinitum, minus old voices and vices. Catch the silent screams. Hear the heartbeats hum.
led the charge against this cumbersome brush and we emerged into large field. Vigilance was key. They were taking too long staring at these flowers and we needed to move faster. Remaining in an open field could be dangerous. Yet still it was absurd.
footsteps lay the mood, misery seared in mind. world so cruel and crude, our path together stretches so far ahead and behind.
The after noon heat harshly emanated from the concrete bur ning our soles. It encouraged longer rides and faster steps, quickly turning the day into an approaching vening as we encountered semblances of architecture in the near distance.
Webbing stretched across the ground, an infectious life creeping onto every surface in reach.
The night finally approached as we neared these foreign designs.
The darkness was repelled by crimson lights, casting a hellish glow onto every brick. Staring at these ruins from afar, the facade’s composition appeared almost cellular. The structures stretched and curved similar to tree’s roots or leaf’s vascular system, like the earth itself had refashioned these remnants into forgeries.
Weight bears down as the world rotates beneath me, my every component working tirelessly to resist the quaking earth, the endless flame, the monstrous gales, and the torrential rains.
In infinite forms, I suffer. I am weary. I resent callused hands.
