Blueprints Lowell Duckert
In design there is nothing foundational. —Bruno Latour, “A Cautious Prometheus?”
Designing without nature has never been possible,1 even if one response to the conglomeration of ecological crises known as the Anthropocene has been an architectural acceleration: the urge to build bigger, faster, and stronger, the need to rise higher than the tsunami’s wave (bungalow), to reside deeper than the soil’s contamination (bunker). Gird. Seal. Dam. Wall. “Pave” (McGuire). Such words are surely recognizable to landscape architects, these verbs that encourage fanatical and fantastical beliefs that the “outside” world can be kept “out” and that place their faith in techno-scientific mastery, foolproof feats of engineering, and the march of teleological progress (grander still: Progress). The course is clear: when topographical untidiness poses a problem, “infrastructure is the solution” (Tucker). What is more, it is the human alpha-architect who assumes the prime position (arkhi-, “chief ”) at the construction site: the material world exists solely as archetypal building blocks that stand at their foreman’s command, a series of cataloged objects erected exactly in accordance with calculated designs that cannot err. As functionality marries practicality, an ontological split ensues. By some stupendous act of scaffolding, the builder (subject) separates from the built (object). If Victor Frankenstein had manufactured fountains (but another animated figure), he would have surely abandoned those creations as well.2 The ways in which we story the shaping of water are no less vulnerable to this anthropocentric logic: from pushed-around “rivers of empire”3 that zigzag “between wildness and utility” (Dawson), to Paolo Bacigalupi’s cli-fi “water knives”—stealthy political agents who cut channels, deals, and throats in a dystopic, dried-up (though not totally unimaginable) American Southwest 4 —dazzling hydrotectures devoid of their temporal and physical connections to the surrounding waterscape seemingly appear out of nothing at all. Parsed this way, the parched treatment and terminology of “design” deserves to be redesigned. The philosopher and sociologist of science Bruno Latour, for one, has recently offered a different approach; noting that the word design comes to English from the French “relooking,” he identifies an affiliation between the field of design and the “things” that populate the field: “the typically modernist divide between materiality on the one hand and design on the other is slowly being dissolved away,” he observes. Look: “[t]o think of artefacts in terms of design means conceiving of them less and less as modernist objects, and conceiving of them more and more as ‘things.’”5 Instead of delineating a seismic shift between nature and culture, that is, the
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