[PROPOSITIONS] ARCH 562 + MUD 722

Within the cannons of western mythology and societal practice(s), the landscape construct of the desert has been positioned as a place in which outcasts, heretics, and visionaries have been voluntarily and involuntarily displaced in order to repent, reconcile, and imagine possible worlds. In America, since the time of its settler colonization, the desert has also been a territory of extreme cultural brutality and experimentation – consumerist, militaristic, utopian, technological, environmental… At the geological edge where the Sonoran Desert meets the Colorado Plateau, this studio engages three subjects in search of a social, conceptual, material and systemic design proposition:

(i) the Mavericks: renegade disciplinary and adjacent figures whose work and ideas have defined trajectories of design possibility within this terrain...
(ii) the Multitude: cultural groups assembled and formed within the political and socio-economic landscape of actors and agents that shape the southwest...
(iii) the Mesa: constructed landforms and landscape constructs that structure potential engagement with the land and its species...

A series of team-based research projects enable students to read and articulate the 'situation' surrounding specific sites / place contexts through 'thick' cartographies, actor networks, and combinatory drawings. Working across media to address systems design, architecture, landscape, and emerging technologies, design proposals posit alternate occupations for the territory set in a near future context(s)...