CONTINGENT LANDSCAPES

| Research Seminar | Spring 2016 |

| CMU School of Architecture | Instructor: Dana Cupkova |

Contingent Landscapes are design experiments focused on the creative translation of large-scale urban data through computational and physical frameworks. The goal of these experiments is to produce a series of prototypes that negotiate between usefulness and creative play, ultimately questioning how geospatial information can affect design thinking and probe new sensibilities within urban scale behavior. This exploration also precipitates a new discursive agenda between the autonomous character of physical artifacts and the relational setup of socio-ecological landscapes. In the context of Morton’s writing on hyperobjects, this work understands physical autonomy and relationality as characteristics embedded within one another; shifting the focus of design away from objective ‘truth’ of contextual data to the constraints of human perception and spatial aesthetics. The hope is to unsettle the kind of pragmatism which has emerged in the era of big data regarding the use of GIS as a singular decision-making tool for the visualization of urban conditions.

ACADIA 2016 Project Catalog
ACADIA Project Exhibition

| DESIGN TEAM LEADER: Dana Cupkova | DESIGN and PRODUCTION TEAM: Andrea Salomon, Aman Tiwar, Aprameya Mysore |