2020 Stephen Lenci Award Submission

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Eric Futerfas Submission for the 2020 UC Berkeley Stephen Lenci Award

Can issues of culture, climate, and space be addressed by retrofitting vegetation into an urban environment without compromising any existing context? This is the question that I am attempting to address with my Masters of Science in Architecture thesis research as a student in the Building Science program. At its core, it demands a profound cooperation between the disciplines of architecture and landscape architecture in order to forge a radical synthesis of their forms and functions. In tandem with this task, I am also attempting to interrogate what this really means in the contemporary context of an impending ecocide and how the disciplines can converge to implement the dramatic changes necessary to thwart such a dire fate. To better understand this prospective path forward, it becomes necessary to examine how we arrived at our current moment. I begin my research with a brief investigation into the history of the relationship between civilization and nature, and how we came to understand these as discrete things; concepts whose divergence has been recursively reinforced through generations of inherited conceptual frameworks established to justify the agency of mankind in our conquest over the landscape and mastery of its extracted matter. For a member of the Building Science group, I cannot help but find myself in a slightly awkward position considering how much research effort is spent perpetrating this conceptual wedge between ourselves and the environment. It should be questioned if optimizing how comfortably removed we can make occupants feel from the exterior is not coddling them into a false sense of security. Of course though, the intention to reduce our energy consumption is a noble and necessary one, but I suspect that there is perhaps a more upstream diagnosis to our society’s antagonistic and unsustainable physical relationship with the environment. The answer, as this submission explores, may lay behind unpacking and remediating the psychological divorce that we’ve made some time ago and exacerbated since. However, the relationship between the psychological and physical experience is as inextricably bound as perhaps it should be between the practices of architecture and landscape architecture. The conveyance of such a message must be spatially deployed onto a stage where it not only demonstrates itself as an integral whole, but proves itself as an asset to society. It is not enough to perpetuate the environmental trend of kitsch homages to the natural world through superficial expressions of bio-emulation. Our built environment must transcend this default mode of pandering and strive for a more materially-minded functional compliment if we are to take ourselves and our existence on spaceship earth seriously. Despite the dire circumstances, I hope to project a potent dose of optimism into the discourse with a radical remedy that can potentially address a peculiar but pervasive condition of our capriciously constructed world. It comes in the form of a benevolent parasite which is both and neither architecture/ landscape; defying definition as much as it defies gravity, seeking to proliferate itself through the urban fabric to retrofit public spaces at the service of reassimilating vegetation, the ubiquity of a nearly forgotten but precious past whose feeble remains may finally be met with reinforcements.


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2020 Stephen Lenci Award Submission by efuterfas - Issuu