MIGRATORY LANDFORMS

| Pittsburgh PA | Summer 2016 |

| Design Research Project | Competition |

Migratory Landforms is a project that explores land-building urbanization strategies inspired by natural sedimentation processes. Expanding on the protective phenomena of barrier islands formed at the cusp of the Mississippi river, Lake Pontchartrain and Black Bay, this project explores a large scale landscape expansion procedure for a changing planet. As climate-change precipitates the loss of habitable ground, ground-building and terraforming is becoming central to the design discipline. The urgency to urbanize and protect vulnerable coastal areas accentuates the need to interweave natural and industrial processes in order to robustly support urban and ecological environments. This project couples a simulation flow strategy that negotiates sediment deposition with the industrial practice of building oil rigs in the ocean in order to produce new migratory landforms. In the context of Morton’s writing on hyperobjects (Morton, 2013), our work supports the physical autonomy within the framework of global relationality, hence shifting the focus of design away from contextual truth of information into the constraints of bio-synthetic logic.

d3 Natural Systems Competition Special Mention
ACADIA 2017 Publications: Project Catalog

| PI & DESIGN PRINCIPAL: Dana Cupkova | DESIGN TEAM: Colleen Clifford, Thomas Sterling |