MDB Portfolio 2020

PORTFOLIO Summer 2020 MDB

This is the portfolio of architectural, design, research, and artistic projects by Mary Dahlman Begley. The projects within span the period from 2017-2020.

To view essays, links, digital content, and blog, please visit www.marydbegley.com

SUN VALLEY HOMES IZZY’S ICE CREAM

4 12

FLORA SAUNA TRIANGLE PARK

18 24

HABITABILITY WORKSHOP CATALYST 2020

30 36

FUTURE OF THE SKYWAYS ARCHIVE AMAZONIA OBSERVING TERRITORY

40 44 52

PLANETARY CHRONOLOGY

58

SUN VALLEY HOMES Spring 2019 Minneapolis, MN

This solo design project is a studio project, completed for M.Arch at University of Minnesota. Second year studio was led by Minneapolis architect adjunct professor Christine Albertsson.

The prompt was to design a modular home for a specific climate.

A Megapolitan is an area in which two or more cities are connected by a highway, and along those routes of connection there is a nearcontinuous fabric of urban sprawl.

Arizona’s Megapolitan is: Phoenix and Tucson, networked together by roads; the micro-climates, different shades of desert; the watersheds, dried out and threatened by new development; and the sites, leftover parcels amid fringe cities.

Can modular housing respond to these conditions? Deployable, customizable, and prefabricated, modular housing offers a way to home the influx of people moving to the fragile ecology of Arizona’s Megapolitan.

Much of Arizona’s Megapolitan is paved, contributing to an urban heat island. This project attempts to add no new impervious surfaces.

Planting that works with the existing landscape will catch runoff. This water management is at the scale of the building and the scale of the site.

Modularity allows for repositioning of modules based on site climate conditions. In these examples, nonoperable windows face incoming monsoons.

An outdoor room is partitioned by planting and breezeblocks - private yet welcoming.

A vent in the floor allows cool air from the shaded area below the house to enter, and operable windows at the top of the tall pink module allow for warm air to escape.

The front door opens into a liminal space: mutable for different familys’ needs.

Underground water cisterns collect runoff from the slanted roofs, and store for gray water usage in the home A small terrace allows for a fully private outdoor room, separate from the entrance deck.

The white module combines on site with breezeblocks, to allow light and air in while preventing excess solar gain. It is clad in glass-fiber reinforced concrete (GFRC), for thermal mass.

The yellow module has inoperable windows that are small, for low solar gain, and a below-ground ‘smart’ module, where machinery for the house is stored.

The blue module has plumbing for a bathroom, hardiboard exterior cladding, and a vent to below to allow for cool air from shaded area to enter.

The pink module is clad in GFRC and has high, operable windows that allow for hot air to escape.

IZZY’S ICE CREAM Spring 2019 Minneapolis, MN

with Erin Kindell, Meg Lunduist

This collaborative design project is a studio project, completed for M.Arch at University of Minnesota. Second year studio was led by professor Malini Srivastava.

The prompt was to re-design a local ice cream factory and cafe, with an innovative take on ‘net zero’ design.

This project concept and design is a collaboration with Erin Kindell & Meg Lundquist. The images presented here were created by MDB.

Erin, Meg and I collaborated on a design that is net zero in that it achieves energy and social goals by providing employment, acting as a community space, and using renewable forms of insulation and energy.

The owners of Izzy’s intentionally located their factory near transit lines; they are employee minded. We took a cue from this ethos and changed the design of Izzy’s to have large, light-filled working space, lit with the same clerestory condition factory

workers now love. Generous retail space includes community rooms, rentable for meetings.

The insulation we chose to meet energy goals is wild rice hulls, a locally sourced agricultural byproduct. A 30’ tall algae tower provides biofuel for the factory’s energy needs. This system of rice hull panels and algae tank allow the creation of seats and visual interest, for visitors, and jobs, for installers and maintainers and researchers of this new technology.

FLORA SAUNA Winter 2020 Minneapolis, MN

with Interesting Tactics

Interesting Tactics (IT) is an architecture collaborative established in 2018. Active participants include Mary Dahlman Begley, Isaac Hase, Drew Smith, and Austin Watanabe.

This project was produced for the 2020 winter art festival, Art Shanty Projects. The structure was exhibited in shanty village on frozen Bde Unma.

Logo below by Drew Smith. All photos

by Samuel Elwood Reed.

In winter 2020, I.T. participated in an annual festival called Art Shanty Projects. The festival makes use of the frozen lakes in the upper midwest as an ephemeral, public, unregulated space. The building typology is informed by ice shanties, the small huts that ice fishers set up for their long stake outs on the ice.

Each shanty at the festival is created by different group of artists. I.T.’s art shanty is called Flora Sauna (for Solar Fauna). Inspired by deep winter greenhouses, we attempted to build a passive solar greenhouse that would be heated by the sun. We planned to grow coniferous plants, and plant seeds for native plants, in hope that the heat from the sun would trick seedlings to bloom into a false, early spring.

On the lake, it was bitter cold. The ice is around a foot thick for most of the month, and despite the cold the crowds totaled in the thousands.

We quickly learned that the weak Minnesota sun provided less heat than the warmth of bodies huddled

together. Our shanty quickly became known as the Sauna for Plants (but people and dogs allowed too).

During the design of the Flora Sauna, we carefully considered program. What would people do inside? How would they know when to leave? Our design was calibrated to allow for flexibility and a purposeful lack of programming.

We shut the visitors inside and they did not know what to do next. The intent was to allow for happy misuse, such as when a group of friends unexpectedly met inside the shanty, or a mother

nursed her baby inside the warm respite on the ice. There is a giddy, uncomfortable silence that settles in on a group of strangers when they are shut inside a greenhouse. Our design was in attempt to not only see if we could do it, to build a passive solar greenhouse, but to test the limits of our ability to care for living things, by testing the most extreme environment, on the edge of habitability.

The Flora Sauna was blissful in its unexpected calmness, an oasis in a busy weekend festival. The plants, however, suffered from the constant stream of visitors letting in cold air.

We were not able to grow anything beyond pine trees and crocus bulbs in the shanty, but the burst of green, so unexpected on a barren, frozen lake, was a tactical paradise on the frozen lake.

TRIANGLE PARK 2019 to 2020 Minneapolis, MN

with Interesting Tactics

Interesting Tactics (IT) is an architecture collaborative established in 2018. Participants include Mary Dahlman Begley, Isaac Hase, Drew Smith, and Austin Watanabe.

This project was funded by Prospect Park Legacy Fund, received in March 2019. The project benefited from guidance by the Garden Club and our neighbors on Barton Ave. Right photo by Drew Smith. All other photos by MDB

Down the hill from my house, which is across the street from IT member Austin’s house, there is a small triangular median. We applied for a neighborhood grant to fund the design of something on the triangle.

We were intentionally vague in our initial proposal, and were delighted to find that homeowners in our neighborhood are also interested in utopia.

The project began with research into the history of the triangle. This included a bit of archival research, turning up aerial photographs and historic neighborhood plats, and a bit of gossiping with the neighbors. The triangle’s caretaking had changed hands multiple times over the years due to disagreements about gardening style between neighbors and members of the garden club.

Gathering up and piecing together the history was a preview of the varying passionate points of view about the triangle.

In August 2019, we held a neighborhood open meeting at the triangle. We presented some design plans for re-landscaping and adding a bench to the triangle.

The event was an action of community engagement, common in architectural practices. The event was also an action of utoping, by collecting our neighbors together to form a social unit.

In the fall, we removed several halfdead juniper bushes to make way

for a small clearing, and eventually a bench. While using an ax to chop at the small trunk of these pine-y bushes, I thought about the neighborhood history grown within the bush. Someone had good intentions in planting this bush, but it did not fare well in the sun. The triangle was a sort of neighborhood laboratory, and our iteration is only the latest. Our work could not exist outside of this record of social practice, just as utopia that attempts to elide reality fails.

Work on the triangle continues summer 2020, as the ground thaws and we begin stretching our legs after a long cold winter. The bench is freshly installed, and the plants growing in around it.

Construction and the creation of a gathering space have new implications in the time of pandemic.

Thus far, our design has changed by planting a lot more colorful flowers.

These flowers - both exotic and native to the Midwest - will grow

throughout the summer and fall, a time release firework display on the median in the road. I will watch from my balcony, and we will tend to the plants.

HABITABILITY WORKSHOP October 2019 Minneapolis, MN with Interesting Tactics This collaborative project is a workshop event that took place October 2019 at the Weisman Art Museum and at a home.

Curator: Boris Oicherman Collaborators: Peng Wu, Marcus Young, Naomi Crocker ONLINE AT: wam.umn.edu/ education/target-studio-for-creativecollaboration/habitability-project/

In 1970 the artist Robert Irwin partnered with space psychologist Ed Wortz to design NASA’s First National Symposium on Habitability of Environments. 49 years later, we convened the Habitability Workshop to make the first steps towards planning a Second National Symposium on Habitability.

We gathered a cohort of collaborators from the arts, commercial space exploration, architecture, space medicine, anthropology and art history to consider the question: What fields of knowledge and ways of knowing are necessary to address the notion of a habitability beyond ‘life support’?

Interesting Tactics joined the Habitability Project in summer 2019. We partnered with curator Boris Oicherman and artists Peng Wu and Marcus Young to design a workshop as an open emergent structure to support multiple evolving conversations, without imposing content.

We carefully arranged the 20 participants into multiple groupings over the weekend of the workshop, playing the neighborhood, the space, and the furniture within

it like a game. The workshop was thoroughly documented, to emulate the 1970 symposium and create a record of thought, which introduced another spatial complexity. The majority of the workshop occurred in Boris’ home, nearby to my own in a leafy neighborhood of Minneapolis.

Our Habitability Workshop began with a question: what is everything that a person needs to inhabit an environment? This demanded an expansion of scope: Which person? Who decides? Who is everyone?

The workshop in 2019 was a testing ground for design approaches. It took place in a private home, in a museum, and in the neighborhood.

We experimented with the structure of conversations, devising an openly evolving “scaffold” structure in which conversations organically progress from small groups to the entire cohort.

This experience encouraged us to see the gathering place more as a “social sculpture” and less as a physical or architectural environment.

Working with Boris, I.T., Peng, and Marcus to plan the Habitability Workshop involved coordinating not only a set of logistics, but a set of ideas. Arranging personal identities and epistemological frameworks, based on knowledge and also assumptions, created a specific conversation; an event of design.

The project also provided as an introduction into the conflictual power of institution. The project is funded by the Warhol Foundation and Weisman Art Museum, and I.T. was hired by

the project. We benefited from this institutional support, as well as the hivelike network of institutions that come into an academic and artistic project of this nature.

Planning is currently underway for the Second National Symposium on Habitability. The project in 2021 is international, and includes close collaboration with Neal White from Office of Experiments in London, Peng Wu, artist currently in China, Boris Oicherman, curator, and Interesting Tactics.

CATALYST 2020 March 2020 Minneapolis, MN

This project is an annual event at the University of Minnesota School of Architecture.

Mary served as curatorial assistant to professor Vahan Misakyan.

VIEW LIVE: z.umn.edu/catalyst2020

The Catalyst event is a week-long course. Master of Architecture students pause their other studio coursework to engage in a collaborative, experimental exercise that explores ideas outside of their regular course of study.

I worked as curatorial assistant to Vahan Misakyan, architect and curator on Cass Gilbert visiting professor fellowship.

The theme of the week was Architectures of Reassurance: between Emergency and Play.

Students were divided into groups for study, and designed an exhibition throughout the week.

As curatorial assistant, I worked with Vahan Misakyan to structure the week’s activities. Students engaged in workshops, study sessions and field trips. The students attended a film screening with the Moving Image Multimedia Studies Graduate Group, guest lectures, and panel events.

FUTURE OF THE SKYWAYS September 2019 Minneapolis, MN with Interesting Tactics This collaborative project is an essay and series of drawings, presented at the Passagen Symposium on 28 September 2019. The symposium was curated by Petunia Magazine at Goethe in the Skyways, pop up Goethe Institute in Minneapolis, MN. Curator: Valerie Chartrain The essay was published by Spector Books in 2019. Editor: Sandra Teitge

Our vision of the future of the skyways was displayed as non-digital augmented reality. We led a tour to view these drawings, positioned on windows in skyways above Minneapolis.

EXCERPT: This is a vision of what the skyways could look like in the future, if they were centered around communal life, as opposed to working and shopping.

The skyways could be a way to cultivate the commons. We imagine this taking place as office spaces and retail continue to be displaced by online networks, leaving a void in the material world. The skyways are an existing infrastructure with the potential for reorienting community life.

Through an investigation into the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (better known as EPCOT), the Minnesota Experimental City, and the US Highway System, we gained insight into the specific strains of postwar utopianism which created the skyway as we know it today. We chose to accelerate and reframe the ideologies which fueled each of these . That is - to utope by imagining a new and optimistic future of the skyways through an investigation of the system’s relationship to the

commons, to climate, and to technology.

Could the skyways serve as an infrastructure to reorient human life towards maintenance of the earth? A new geologic layer which would scrub the anthropocene into a thin crust suspended above the world?

The skyways enable an alternative way to see the world from above, below, and within - walking between circulatory tubes and viewing a rewilded ground from above. Skyways could connect what the highways separated, the stuff of life is recondensed.

ARCHIVE AMAZONIA

December 2019 Minneapolis, MN with Meg Lundquist and Hana Bushyhead This collaborative project is a studio project, completed for M.Arch at University of Minnesota. ARCH 8255: Surveillant City studio was led by professor Vahan Misakyan.

In the late summer and into the fall of 2019, the Amazon Rainforest was on fire. The acute emergency called our attention to researching and mapping the condition of the Amazon, and led to a speculative research project. The final design proposal is a network of archives; we designed a protocol and a spatial logistic to make an argument about globalization, extraction, and emergency in the Amazon.

--EXCERPT: The Amazon has long held status as a territorial condition, a fiction of the international imagination, an abstraction, rather than a place that is both biome and anthrome.

In August 2019 the Amazon Rainforest was experiencing more fires that month than any other month on record.

The emergency, caused by human manipulation of natural conditions, exacerbated the natural into a preternatural state of heightened urgency.

The world was on fire. It was a global emergency. In the public sphere, the realm of appearances, political agents perform agendas.

Politics around emergency create a new logic that exists despite and outside of geography, and uses emergency to further the reach of bureaucratic action.

--In 1970, the military government of Brazil created the National Integration Plan and the Transamazonian Highway was constructed.

The Highway was a method for expanding Brazil’s productive capacity into the untapped regions of the Northwest. Farmers were lured from the fertile south to colonize wild Amazonia. The road gave the military access to defend Brazil’s natural resources. The building of this road, despite its nationalist rhetoric, was financed and built by a combination of Brazilian and veiled foreign organizations.

In 2019, Jair Bolsonaro was elected president with the slogan “Brazil above Everything, God above Everyone.”

The Amazon is no longer merely nature, but also a product of the symbiotic and parasitic relationships between human and nature, politics and geography, machine and terrain.

The Amazon as global “nature� is obsolete. It has no role in the current economy.

Our proposal oscillates between acting earnestly, being utopian, and offering critique. The Amazonian Archive pauses the cycle of anthropogenic and ecologic changes. It saves the Amazon,

not for re-generating later, but to generate and share knowledge.

The original order of the Amazon is the power inscribed within this project. Our proposed intervention is an Amazonian Archive, or rather a system of archives that constitute a new infrastructure for the production of knowledge.

--Using a new set of tools and machines, local activists-turnedarchivists capture and curate the artifacts of the biological, ecological, and anthropogenic however they want- they are the experts!

They report to field offices.

The original order of the forest, as the people of the forest determine, is preserved in the archive. The field office operates as the base for collecting.

Navigational maps will orient the archivists, as they gear up for a collecting trip. The archivists will process, and catalog the artifacts they collect. This is the spatial product of the archival infrastructure, a repeated series of program.

Manaus is a node for logistics in this archival system. Manaus is the largest city in the Amazon, home to 3 million people. Manaus’s icon is the Amazon Theater, a pink Portugese Colonial-style building is yet another collector, as well as a place of performance.

This logistics center is where artifacts are brought to be processed; program sorted, documented, and packed into containers heading further east to Maraba.

Navigating the Amazon and Tocanteens river, the institute’s vessel carries passengers and a multi-storied archive to Maraba.

By inserting the archive into preexisting transportation flows that extract people and resources,

The mobile archive becomes a stage for a new surveillance effort that documents manmade production,

environmental effects, and movement patterns.

In this way, the archive generates its own data.

Instead of becoming a machine for waiting, the people on the boat are in the process of navigating and archiving by becoming familiar with the artifacts and geography of the amazon.

OBSERVING TERRITORY December 2019 University of Minnesota This solo project is a theoretical essay, GIS mapping project, and presentation, prepared for ARCH5731 - Territory, fall 2019.

The project was advised and evaluated by assistant professor Gabriel CuĂŠllar.

VIEW LIVE: https://arcg.is/0rmini0

EXCERPT: Earth-observing satellites are necessarily tied to territory. Their cool, mechanical gaze is trained on the planet - watching and transmitting. The uplink and downlink of a satellite present a connection to the Earth. The distance between the two, and the distance of the satellite, form the footprint. This range of transmission constitutes a satellite’s territorial realm.

Satellites are an instrument, or rather a vehicle for sensing instruments, that allow humans to see beyond their biological capability. By making the landscape legible, satellites form territories.

How does satellite vision communicate?

The Landsat program is managed

by NASA and jointly operated by NOAA. A rocket, in the case of Landsat 4, Delta 3920, carried the satellite to orbit. The satellite was launched from Vandenberg Air

Force Base in California. The uplink, managing information, is transmitted from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Downlink, information sensed, is transmitted to one of four receiving stations: in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, North Pole, Alaska, Alice Springs, Australia, and Svalbard, Norway.

Landsat 5 was launched in 1984 and became, in 2013, the longest Earthobserving satellite mission in history.

These images, from 2003, begin to suggest how satellite imagery can

articulate territory.

Satellite imagery speaks our language. Through images like this, the world is able to see changes over time. The pattern of fishbone development, occurring through processes of deforestation and extraction, in the Amazon, is visible by satellite. When made public, like on Google Maps, the condition is rendered legible. The Amazon became a territory of concern by way of the satellite.

NAVIGATION Satellite imagery provides an omniscient view. Through computation, images are transmitted and stitched together, to provide a view humans would be unable to attain without these extensions of our faculties. This technological extension creates a new environment, whereby a world without this capability is hard to imagine. (Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Message) Google Maps is generated by massive amounts of computational data, captured from both terrestrial

and atmospheric viewpoints. By using Google Maps, we are interacting with the vast computational network that translates satellite-captured data into imagery.

Google Maps primarily uses imagery captured by Landsat 8 for its planar, top-down “satellite view� layer. This imagery is combined with aerial photography, taken from an aircraft.

By providing imagery at multiple resolutions, the application presents a seamless visualization when zoomed into the scale of a building

or out to the scale of a continent.

Google Maps’ data visualization is leveraged for navigation.

Navigation is synthetic operation - between the conceptual and the material. (Patricia Reed, “Orientation in a Big World: On the Necessity of Horizonless Perspectives) Meg taught me how to navigate: look at the map, identify potential landmarks, then look to your surroundings to match the conceptual landmarks, rendered by symbols on paper, to their material reality.

Navigational applications like Google Maps, bypass the process of connecting concept to material.

A turn-by-turn route, algorithmically determined, creates a manageable interface between the user and the city. This cloud-enabled technology is an insertion of machine control (Benjamin Bratton, The Stack), and we (usually) follow the instructions diligently. By translating conceptual, locational information to verbal, bitesized commands, the city becomes legible.

PLANETARY CHRONOLOGY Master's Final Project University Of Minnesota with Meg Lundquist

VIEW LIVE: www.planetarychronology.com ABSTRACT Layer by layer, the planet accrues new records of time. [1] Geosphere became biosphere and atmosphere, with root systems and tree branches blurring the edges of geo- and atmo. The breath of ancient plants is recorded in deep time: the planetary chronology.

Human Nature to produce, consume, and seek comfort [2] led to violent extraction on behalf of the lucky few.

[3] This obscene [4] disruption of the natural record keeping brought about a new thin crust, encircling the planet with layer upon layer of technosphere. [5] Extracted past is superheated and hyperformed into new creature comforts. Geosphere, biosphere, and atmosphere are blurred and complicated by the accumulation of Human Nature.

Human Nature constitutes the Anthropocene.

This project uses new methods of representation and interdisciplinarity to show planetary chronology as an architecture at the scale of the globe. This paper is prepared for the occasion of Master’s Final Project, spring 2020, for the Master of Architecture at University of Minnesota. Research occurred in the first five months of 2020, and was guided by studio critic Vahan Misakyan.

INTRODUCTION Planetary Chronology is the synchronous happenings of human nature and planetary nature, it is record-keeping at the scale of the planet and the scale of a pixel.

Planetary Chronology logs the tendency of the planet to accrue new layers of matter upon old, showing a stratigraphic and chronologic section.

Planetary nature and human nature occur simultaneously, disrupting each other, acting on each other, making impressions on each other.

Planetary Chronology is an inquiry, a series of representational experiments, a navigational device, an interactive drawing, an archive, a repository of samples, and an intervention into methods of thinking about and representing the planet. Engaging the Anthropocene discourse, the project connects architecture to systems of the planet.

STAKES We engage with the terrestrial, architectural, and conceptual by articulating our research at varying scales, resolutions, and perspectives.

Through its digital organization, the project demonstrates chronological, stratigraphic, and synchronous narratives within planetary chronology.

Disseminated in digital media online, in

curated reviews with interdisciplinary experts, and in submissions to journals, this project engages a multitude of specific audiences.

Taking on interdisciplinary and architectural languages, Planetary Chronology rethinks the architectural scale and the perspective of systems thinking.

The systems that govern our planet are often represented in abstraction, without spatial implications. What geologists and climatologists recognize to be a closed system,

spatial terms. By drawing planetary systems as a synchronous, continuous stack that places geo- and atmo- together, we are asserting the simultaneity of these processes.

where singular events have planetaryscale impacts, architecture recognizes to be open. The perceived openness leads to representation that forms and reifies a hegemonic system that sees the planet as a totality to be governed; the earth can be designed and redesigned for anthropocentric means, when represented as a tidy package of systems. [6] We understand planetary systems as processes, constantly in flux from the scale of the particulate to the scale of the planet. Terrestrial matter records these processes and we translate the evidence into

Drawing Geo- and Atmo- together requires the knitting together of multiple disciplines [7]; learning strategies for collecting and analyzing evidence, and translating their data for optimal navigability. [8] Architectural scale must be stretched to its limit.

Architectural drawings are completed in different scales to emphasize objects big and small.

These scales limit thinking to that which is visible with the naked eye and to that which is static.

Meteorological scales denote both time and space and measure primarily that which is unseen. We assert that architectural scale must accommodate more radical translations, wider breadth in all directions, and include an understanding of time.

The dissemination of our experiments in representation articulate the stakes for this project. Not only does our project speak to architectural workers and thinkers, encouraging the broadening of architectural scale to planetary scale and understanding of systems as processes, but the project must address discourse of the Anthropocene.

The Anthropocene is the geologic era in which human intervention is recorded in the planetary chronology. As a contested term, it is not yet officially accepted by the International commission on stratigraphy, and philosophers debate its utility. We, however, see the value in the term. Sociologists, anthropologists, climate scientists, political scientists, philosophers and architects alike use the term to denote phenomenons caused or exacerbated by humans.

AMBITION The ambition of the project began with a desire to identify and detail the urgent problem of our time.

We identified the changing climate in the planetary section, noting interpolations and aberrations into the geo- and atmo-.

Our ambition to intervene in discourses of architecture and the Anthropocene asserts a perspective of planetarity, materiality, and deep time. For architectural discourse, the project urges an extreme zoom out and a recognition of time as a scale. For the discourse of the Anthropocene, the project proposes a representational

technique where there previously was none. The ambition to present a new representational method and heuristic from geo- to atmo- is central to our project’s life on the internet.

SCOPE To have a planetary scope is to reject geographic limitations in pursuit of knowledge. A post-globalism world constructs a tangled web of intricacy, like the pipelines snaking across North America, connecting nationstates through the unyielding demand for energy. Climatic questions require a particular attention to this hypercomplexity as near-every system on the planet affects and is affected by the climate.

The project engages the material geospheres: the accumulation, movement, and state-changes of materials as they flow through the lithosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, and atmosphere, as well as the ephemera of the spheres; climate, biology, media.

Frontier is a condition within each sphere. The Dakotas, our initial site, are a frontier through time and space. The tight shale is a frontier of extraction, hydraulic fracturing the latest device to pass this frontier.

With the device comes the man camps; frontier of human comfort, providing a source of labor to work in deadly conditions, new nationalism and the increasing desire to be energy independent- and dependent on the source of energy from within geopolitical confines.

In investigating extraction, the ties between the environment, labor, and the political become intricately enmeshed. Extraction is driven by the need for energy, production, and capital-building. Energy relies on an extractable good, created with stored time and captured in geologic layers millions of years before the Anthropocene. The rhythm of planetary nature and flows of energy intersect human nature and extraction.

Adapting and translating the

discourse around Anthropocene allows the project to connect architecture to systems thinking at varying resolutions. In the project, geologists, carbon scientists, and architects are designers. The project scope is predicated on frontier conditions of the Anthropocene, and identifiable relationships between spheres.

METHOD The primary methodologies of the project are the collection of data and ideas with a wide interdisciplinarity,

a critical drawing practice, nonlinear presentation, collaboration, and curated conversations. These methodologies are emergent; we adapt.

The collection of architectural data relies on what is visible and (often) what is tangible. Other disciplines, including geology and climatology, use sensing methods to collect invisible and intangible data.

Through satellites, core samples, soil samples, sensing mechanisms, and other instrument-based data collections, these disciplines produce representation methods of their own. We have studied the methods of data collection most valuable to Anthropocene discourse and translated their methods into an architectural-visual language.

Our critical drawing practice requires not only translation of interdisciplinary data, but an agnostic view of architectural convention.

We challenge the limits of a section

drawing by expanding the section until it cut through ‘everything’, on all sides. It was only through the practice of data-gathering and translation that our drawing began to articulate questions about planetary chronology.

The confines of social distancing provided an opportunity for testing methods of presentation. By designing the project website’s user interface and developing a data structure that promotes exploring, we tested non-linear presentation as a method for architectural reviews. Rather than a one-sided presentation of the work, we invited guests to explore the ideas with us.

The website intentionally promotes multiple visitor paths, and provides no distinct ending point.

Working as a collaboration, the project takes on questions, representations, and ambitions of the collaboration as whole. We intentionally share authorship of the

project. The work itself is evidence of collaboration, not one individual can create or represent the work, just as the project is not singular.

Throughout the semester, we had conversations with individuals from a variety of disciplines. We spoke with architects, a pipeline specialist, critical geographers, an environmental activist, authors, philosophers, art historians, and others. By purposefully expanding our scope beyond the architectural studio, we enacted the ambition of

the project to intervene in multiple discourses.

INVESTIGATION PLANETARY + HUMAN NATURE(S) Our investigation begins in the Dakotas. Selected for their proximity, geology, and economy, the Dakotas serve as testing ground for our ideological framework. We researched the age-old dichotomy between nature and culture, and discovered the futility of defining either as a static object. The nature of which we speak is not an

object, but a process: the nature of things as they are. This definition requires further nuance, to delineate technological processes of extraction from biological processes of energy exchange.

Planetary Nature is regular to the Earth: accruing of matter on the surface, seasonal variation, and orbital patterns. All but orbit has been upended by human activity, affecting both the geosphere (by means of anthropogenic sediment [9] and extraction [10]) and the atmosphere (by means of the dramatically changing climate [11]).

Human nature is a rhythm of production and consumption, governed by structures that encourage the never-ending pursuit of comfort. This nature creates new layers of earth upon old: this is the Anthropocene.

ANTHROPOCENES Different monikers have been proposed since the early 20th century to aid in explaining and arguing the Anthropocene. Among them are: Anna Tsing and Donna Haraways’ Plantationocene, Jussi Parikka’s Anthrobscene, Andreas Malm and Moores’ Capitalocene, Haraway’s Chthulucene. Striations of these -cenes are present within the Anthropocene discourse as parallel stages.

Even beyond its ability to gather interdisciplinary researchers and discourse, Anthropocene is a device for questioning and testing, geologically and architecturally, the accumulation of matter and the disruption of chronostratigraphic deep time as a result of human nature.

PLANETARY SECTION To represent a planetary section, we begin with North and South Dakota.

Standing in Minneapolis, we look towards the Dakotas. North Dakota is to our right, South Dakota is to our left. From the Dakotas, we go further into the Earth, through layers of deep time and through the holes made by the Anthropocene. Going far enough through the earth, we arrive at the other side, the Antipode.

The section at the scale of the globe is spatial, but also temporal. It keeps the chronology of the planet, and participates in the recording of the now. The project engages the material geospheres: the accumulation, movement, and statechanges of materials as they flow through the lithosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, and atmosphere, as well as the ephemera of climate, biology, and media.

But we have not made a tunnel, we have cut the whole Earth, through everything on all sides. In making that cut, we cut through any number of spheres, and objects like submarine internet cables in the Colombian trench, Walruses on Wrangel island, a glacier, the Federal Petroleum reserves, the Tianjin Municipality, a bioluminescent lagoon, a cloud of methane; all instances of planetary chronology.

Geology and atmosphere are media that can be read back. To read these drawings, kilometers must translate to pixels; the planet must be understood in section at a resolution fine enough to articulate events of the Anthropocene at all scales. Geologic cores and stratigraphic maps provide the most detail. Geographies with potential for oil and mineral resources have the highest-fidelity data, tying the field of geology to fossil capital.

While a sectional understanding

reveals intricate relationships between spheres, loyalty to the data and the section forecloses some opportunities for understanding the planet in finer resolution.

ARCHIVE OF THE RECENT PAST Archive is used as a tool to research and represent stories of the recent past within the planetary section. The planetary section is a powerful tool for translation of data into architectural language, and representing planetary scale, but it forecloses some possibilities.

Sections do not, strictly speaking, include perspective. The ideology of a section includes the implication that sections reveal an interior. The planetary section reveals not only the interior, but the multiple punctures and interpolations into geo- and atmo- that occur on the crust of the Earth. While this drawing strategy is revelatory in its representation of data, the section (at this extreme scale) forecloses the possibility of layering in narrative information; information that engages with spatial histories in a qualitative way are gathered in the archive of the recent past.

The archive shows extreme points of geology and atmosphere. It contains stories of displacement, extraction, exploitation. In the archive, the geographies and geologies of the planetary section are enhanced with another layer of media. These entries into the archive are of the recent past; the geo-temporal events recorded here are being entered into the record of deep time.

SOIL SAMPLES The planetary section is austere in its loyalty to data. To draw cores and samples from distant places in the Anthropocene, we rely solely on data and reports. Like the archive of the recent past, soil sampling is a practice that represents what the planetary section cannot. To divorce sectional geologic data from extractive economies and view the planet at the scale of a particle, we have to get closer than the section cut.

Soil systems are often viewed as open systems. Soil can change states with additions or subtractions of minerals, water, nutrients. By processing these materials, soil participates as a part of a more complex closed system at the scale of the planet, a system of climate, hydrology, ecology, geology. The nature of this closed system, the sum of all -spheres related to our home planet, is that it retains all energy which is exhausted. [12] The atmosphere retains every particle emitted on Earth, and geology records every piece of matter existing on Earth. Soil science acknowledges the relationships between the closed system of earth and how soil is imprinted with information of the globe, a media of surface geology.

Where geologic cores measure stratigraphy at a resolution for sensing at the scale of a formation, soil exists between the spheres (geo, bio, atmo) and measure stratigraphy with a resolution fine enough to

detect the intricacies of material.

These sampling methods encode the biosphere, atmosphere, and geosphere as media. We sample our own material realities to tell a story of our recent past. In doing sampling at the scale of ourselves, we break our own rule, we do not follow the section cut or the antipode, but we reveal what the planetary section forecloses.

The samples reveal minute details of anthropogenic materials and how we articulate the Anthropocene around us. The act of collecting samples is haptic and shows processes and material conditions at a high resolution.

IMPLICATIONS TOWARD CRITICAL PRACTICE Planetary Chronology as a collaborative project has the potential for developing a critical practice for us, Mary and Meg. A critical spatial practice [13] is a means of rethinking one’s modes of action and codes of conduct. This self reflexive act is generative; we learn a process for being in the world. Several instances from conversations during the development of the project demonstrate implications toward critical practice.

In studio with Vahan Misakyan, Meg and Mary took on many roles.

Vahan encouraged us to follow our instincts and act as amateur geologists, economists, philosophers, political scientists - whatever. This research technique was primary to our developing a Master’s

Final Project with the ambition, scope, and potential for our future ways of working as architectural designers. The encouragement to be “epistemophilic” opened inquiry; the positions we developed through our collaboration were then tested against new avenues of thinking.

In review of the project, invited guests Ana María León and Bruce Braun encouraged us to break the rules of the section cut and examine what the section reveals and also what it leaves behind. This prompted additional methods of questioning existing drawings, and new modes of collecting and representing data.

Their expertises, in architecture of settler colonial history and critical geography, respectively, allowed the conversation to begin with an informed understanding of the scope of our project. The identification of the limits of the planetary section, reached through discussion, allowed us to deepen the inquiry of the project.

These methods became new ways of inquiry as we worked, but the question during our final review from Ozayr Salojee asked for projection into the future. The element of our work with potential to be applied to a wide variety of architectural, spatial, and creative questions is the project’s extreme scalar shifts. This way of working contains the ability to show the relationship of an aggregation of small elements in relationship to the planet. Oscillation is native to an online interface, but the practice we developed of a drawing that is

explicitly zoomed in and zoomed out is a specific intentionality. By developing this drawing practice, we have the potential to learn about the way in which a mass of small actions can affect the planet; the way that a network of billions of tiny leaves act in sync to create an atmosphere. Articulating the world through experimental representation techniques that foreground scale shift can help us to design a better world with small intention, acting lightly on the planet, in sync with a planetary system.

Planetary Chronology is a moment in time, but sets itself up to be a device for the future. Through the methods, heuristic, and practice we have designed, we can build and expand on the ideas of Planetary Chronology.

SUMMATION

and consumption. The urgency of

Planetary Chronology is a drawing,

climate change is the urgency of

a navigational device, an archive, a

architecture. Anthropocene discourse

repository of samples. Engaging the

exists outside of architecture, but in

Anthropocene discourse, the project

planetary chronology, Anthropocene

connects architecture and systems at

is interpreted as a question of

the scale of a pixel to the scale of the

space. We are on the edge of a new

planet.

geologic era, a frontier. The project is architecture at the scale of the planet.

Climate change is too simple a

It urges that planetary chronology is

term for what feels like a shift in the

architecture.

global atmosphere - both the literal air and the rising panic - due to a new paradigm of energy production

Notes 1. Parikka, Jussi. A geology of Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. “history conflates with earth history...the geological materials of metals and chemicals get deterritorialized from their strata and re territorialized in machines that define our technical media culture” (35) 2. Grosz, Elizabeth. Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. “Art and nature, art in nature, share a common structure: that of excessive and useless production-production for its own sake, production for the sake of profusion and differentiation. (9) 3. per Haraway, “Making Kin” : “In a recorded conversation for Ethnos at the University of Aarhus in October, 2014, the participants collectively generated the name Plantationocene.” Noboru Ishikawa, Anna Tsing, Donna Haraway, Scott F. Gilbert, Nils Bubandt, Kenneth Olwig (interdisciplinary group, including Kenneth Olwig, landscape architecture): the devastating transformation of diverse kinds of human-tended farms, pastures, and forests into extractive and enclosed plantations, relying on slave labor and other forms of exploited, alienated, and usually spatially transported labor 4. Jussi Parikka, The Anthrobscene, 2015: an effort to emphasize the obscenity of Anthropocene, “a horrific human-caused drive toward a sixth mass extinction of species” 5. Colomina, Beatriz and Mark Wigley. Are we human? Notes on an archeology of design. Zurch, Switzerland. Lars Muller Publishers, 2016. “humans no longer move across a small part of a very thin layer on the skin of the earth, nomadically foraging for resources as if acting lightly on a vast stage. They now encircle the planet with layer upon layer of technocultural nets, posing an ever-greater threat to their own survival” (12) 6. Bonneuil, Christophe and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. The Shock of the Anthropocene. London: Verso, 2017.

P48 7. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.“...we are always attempting to re-tie the Gordian knot by crisscrossing, as often as we have to, the divide that separates exact knowledge and the exercise of power - let us say nature and culture.” (3) 8. Reed, Patricia. “Orientation in a Big World: On the Necessity of Horizonless Perspectives.” E-flux, #101, June 2019. “Navigation is, above all, a synthetic operation.”

9. Zalasiewicz, Jan & Waters, Colin & Williams, Mark & Summerhayes, C. The Anthropocene as a Geological Time Unit. Cambridge University Press, 2019. “Anthropogenic sediments are moved across the surface of the planet via artificial processes that may be contrasted with that of natural sediment-transport systems (described as gravity and aeolian/wind deposit). ..The artificial flux of anthropogenic materials follows no consistent natural pathway” (60) 10. Arboleda, Martín. Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction under Late Capitalism. London: Verso, 2020. “geography of extraction that emerges as the most genuine product of two distinct yet overlapping worldhistorical transformations: first, a new geography of late industrialization that is no longer circumscribed to the traditional heartland of capitalism (the west), and second, a quantum leap in the robotization and computerization of the labor process brought about by what I will term the fourth machine age” (4) 11. Szeman, Imre, Wilson, Sheena, and Carlson, Adam. Petrocultures : Oil, Politics, and Culture. Montreal ; Kingston ; London ; Chicago: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017. “Extractivist, capitalist production has resulted in what is now being referred to as the Anthropocene: human-induced climate change on such a scale and to such a degree that it can now be mapped within geological time.” (12) 12. Fuller, Buckminister. Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. Baden, Switzerland: Lars Müller, 2008.

13. Editors Nikolaus Hirsch and Markus Miessen, for their series Critical Spatial Practice, ongoing at Sternberg Press.

Peter Lang, 1994.