GSD: Atmospheric Encounters
“Atmospheric Encounters: Visualizing the Invisible” is a Fall 2024 course offered by the Graduate School of Design and taught by Craig Douglas. The class will convene at ArtLab for site visits and student critiques throughout the semester. At the end of the course, students will participate in an open studio at ArtLab.
Craig Douglas (ArtLab faculty-in-residence, 2024-2025) is a Landscape Architect and scholar whose work focuses on innovative techniques and methodologies that explore the agency of representation in landscape architectural design.
Course Description:
Air is the invisible and indivisible planetary matter that constitutes all life. It is an agent of entanglement and interconnection, operating as a network of enveloped material processes that hold the world together while remaining seemingly indifferent to human endeavors. The air continuously signals and reframes the world in which we live, acting simultaneously to indicate future potentials and describe symptoms of the past. As the most prominent material we encounter every moment of every day, its commonality and invisible nature belies its fundamental role in supporting life on the planet.
Atmosphere, considered as both form and process, is a palimpsest of conditional processes and properties, one that is open-ended, flexible, and adaptable, displaying a self-organizing dynamism. It is defined and shaped by a collection of material processes that reflect dynamic ecological, economic, social, and technological conditions. The resultant dynamic formal composition of these phenomena inherently describes the forces that have shaped them, in which form translates the material registration of force as ‘a network of enveloped material processes’ and a complex temporal and material manifold of differential space.
The course will explore diverse atmospheric conditions with tools, techniques, and design methods for making the invisible visible. The aspiration is to explore the measuring and mapping of the air as matter oscillating between physical, digital, corporeal, and cultural definitions that redefine site as a landscape of living and lived space through atmospheric encounters.
Through the work the class will be asked to address a range of core questions including: What are new and emergent ways of understanding the atmospheric environment? How might this approach challenge and generate new understandings of space and conceptualizations of ‘site’? How might this work reframe a description, and a making of new environments not prioritized as extensions of humans, but rather as new configurations that include, and re-value, non-human agents? How might this generate new forms of engagement in response to issues of climate change? What conceptual shifts might this propagate, and how might this approach shape new forms of design practice?