Pilar Zuluaga's Portfolio

pilar zuluaga

selected professional + academic works

CONTENTS

Reading the American Landscape

Disaster-Resilient Community Design

Reconciling Indigenous Claims at a Land Grant University

Reshaping the Informal: Progressive Architecture by Modules

Planning for the Future Growth of Bogota

Map Samples:

USACE Inland Waterways and their Dredging Volumes by Districts

Relationship between Tonnage in the Port of Mobile, AL and the top 10 U.S. Ports in 2019

Travel Photography Samples

READING THE AMERICAN LANDSCAPE

The passing of the Taylor Grazing Act in 1934 marked the closing of the American frontierall remaining public domain land was transferred into the hands of the US Forest Service for administration. The progressive conservation agenda called for careful scientific management of these landscapes in the name of sustained exploitation of rangeland resources. What resulted were a series of landscape manipulations, from the re-seeding of entire landscapes with imported grass species, to the application of Agent Orange by airplane, that forced an inappropriately rigid scientific agenda of control onto a landscape system deeply vulnerable to environmental flux. The legacy of these alterations and the blanket of federal landscape management endures in the contemporary American West - today, 245-million acres of grazing lands are administered by the Bureau of Land Management.

85-years after the passing of the Taylor Grazing Act, this project explores the landscape legacy of extreme, federally managed ecological alterations of western rangelands. Current work occurs through critical mapping of rangeland ecoregions. Final maps will express the complicated relationships between the arid western landscape, ecology, natural resources, land use and property ownership (private/ public). Funding is being pursued to incorporate fieldwork and photography into the investigation.

DISASTER-RESILIENT COMMUNITY DESIGN

The potential for disaster increases as more communities expand into hazard-prone areas and climate change exacerbates threats. These disaster-resilient design solutions can help communities reduce the impact of disasters, recover more quickly, strengthen local economies and cultures, and create more enjoyable, equitable places to live.

The strategies presented here include policies such as forest management and building codes that can be key to protecting life and property from natural disasters. Most of the designs focus more on landscape-based investments such as recreational amenities that offer hazard mitigation value while also improving the daily lives of residents. Communities can design public spaces and infrastructure to be multi-functional so that multiple benefits can be derived from each project and financial investment. The design solutions are intended to inspire a range of stakeholders to come together and invest in projects and infrastructure that achieve multiple benefits. Stakeholders could include emergency managers, land use planners, utility managers, forestry and parks departments, watershed managers, and community-based organizations.

TORNADO and EARTHQUAKE

Counties most at risk for Earthquakes and Tornado tracks between 1986-2019

Index Rating Eathquakes

Risk

Boundaries

Tracks between

Risk

DISASTER

DROUGHT

Rating

River Systems

AK HI

Drought is a prolonged period of unusually low rainfall, which varies depending on the place and time of year. It is a set of conditions that arise relatively slowly and affect communities differently. Prolonged and repeated droughts can lead to low water supply levels, which can affect energy generation, and depleted reservoirs.

The balance between agricultural and residential/commercial water demand varies at local and regional scales, and droughts often occur over large areas. Compact development patterns can reduce both water demand and the amount of water lost to leaks in aging pipes. Along with drought-tolerant landscaping and efficient use of water for buildings, green infrastructure can replenish groundwater supplies through infiltration practices such as bioretention and permeable pavements.

Landscape-based designs using soil and vegetation to absorb runoff also can be used to increase stream baseflows and reduce the impacts of drought on water supplies.

RESOURCES

• EPA WaterSense Program https://www.epa.gov/watersense

• North American drought Monitor https://www.ncdc.noaa. gov/temp-and-precip/drought/nadm/

• National Drought Mitigation Center https://drought.unl.edu/

• Resilience Strategies for Drought https://www.c2es.org/wpcontent/uploads/2018/10/resilience-strategies-for-drought.pdf

• FEMA Building Community Resilience with NatureBased Solutions https://www.fema.gov/sites/default/ files/documents/fema_riskmap-nature-based-solutionsguide_2021.pdf

• Building Drought Resilience in California’s Cities and Suburbs https://www.ppic.org/wp-content/uploads/content/ pubs/report/R_0617DMR.pdf

Collecting water to seep into the aquifer wide drought.

in

Data taken

Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), National Drought Mitigation Center (NDMC), U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA),

Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Esri; Rand McNally; Bartholemew and Times Books; Digital Chart of the World (DCW); U.S. National GeospatialIntelligence Agency;

Department of Commerce, U.S. Census Bureau, Esri; Garmin International, Inc.;

Central Intelligence Agency.

Drought reduces water supplies for drinking water, agriculture, energy production, and other uses.

DROUGHT

WATER HARVESTING

XERISCAPING

HOME

Aquifer recharge

INLAND and RIVERINE FLOODING

Counties most at risk for Riverine Flooding and 1% annual chance flood hazard area

Special Flood Hazard Area (SFHA) Risk Index Rating Riverine Flooding

1% annual chance High Risk

Climate change is causing more frequent and higher intensity rainstorms, which often result in increased flooding. AK HI

River Systems

INLAND and RIVERINE FLOODING

Native vegetation helps infiltration during rain

Stream channel connected to the flood plain

intensity

CREATE HEALTHY STREAMS

Use vegetated stream buffers to slow water during storm events, lowering downstream flood risk.

INCORPORATE GREEN INFRASTRUCTURE ON SITE

In urban areas, bioswales, rain gardens and urban tree canopies help reduce runoff, which prevents flooding.

Green parking lot Bump-out rain garden

https://www.epa. gov/smartgrowth/enhancing-sustainable-communities-green-

https://riskfactor.com https://www.epa.gov/

https://www. epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-river-

https:// States: https://www.epa.gov/system/files/

WATER PLAZA

Building play and recreational areas that store rain helps reduce flooding in the neighborhood.

Cisterns for water storage/usage

STORMWATER MANAGEMENT ORDINANCES

Include

BUILDING CODES AND ZONING

Incorporate stormwater management into local building and zoning codes.

RESTORATION OF NATURAL FLOOD PLAINS

Create ordinances that protect flood plains.

REDUCTION OF IMPERVIOUS SURFACES REDUCES RUNOFF

GREEN ROOFS

Green surfaces reduce runoff.

Trail Rain gardenGreen roof

Bioswale Splash pad

RECONCILING INDIGENOUS CLAIMS AT A LAND GRANT UNIVERSITY

“Reconciling Indigenous Claims at a Land Grant University” at Auburn University studies and re-designs the campus arboretum through the lens of land reclamations and colonialism. It adopts Pierre Bélanger’s “un-design” concept as a spatial language that retroactively overwrites the present by underscoring the past. This undertaking includes grounding territories with their treaties and renewing relations by building alliances between the design and the land in a nonhierarchical way. It means undesigning a Eurocentric Arboretum so that the ideas that shape the place are grounded in the aboriginal territory, not the vestiges of a colonial past.

In the Davis Arboretum, this means “un-designing” the place towards transparency. Transparency is defined as the quality that allows light to pass through, free from pretense or deceit. This concept is embraced by adopting a design that yields by the existing place. Materials are locally sourced, infrastructure is minimal, and lines drawn celebrate the existing site. Rock lines are drawn precisely but loose – to shape new ground for gathering but minimizing the impact on trees. Gaps allow movement – of water, plants, and people – and celebrate subtlety and nuance of the existing terrain. The design is grounded in the landscape’s native, ecological, cultural and historical context. The project responds sensitively to the existing conditions by embracing the land how it is: an assemblage of Southeastern plant species that tell the story of Alabama’s biodiversity.

Landscape Architecture Foundation The Green New Deal Superstudio

The Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture Student Creative Scholarship: Honorable Mention

The cultivation of plants through gardening has been around for thousands of years dating to the ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia civilizations. However, botanic gardens with a scientific foundation were created in Italy around the 16th and 17th centuries. It didn’t take long for arboretums to become popular as a garden of trees, perfectly assembled for scientific and educational purposes as well as for aesthetic value, systematically displayed and carefully catalogue, following the Victorian values of desire to acquire, and of order and control.

Arboretums and Botanic Gardens Loot: This idea of “contained for consumption” is translated to arboretums as places dedicated to conservation. However, “conservation” normalizes domination for extermination. For “the generation of conservationists [...] preservation of nature was the preservation of white supremacy. Naturalism of nationalism […] Heteropatriarchal man, conveniently universalized to consume the ‘New World’ by disarming Indigenous systems of governance and kinships to rearm a ‘wilderness’ for ‘the civilized’ and ‘the superior’, free of ‘savages’ or ‘Blacks’ recounted in racist, frontier-fantasy novels” (Bélanger 2020, 120-127).

Design Dehumanises: The land and the people are a rationalized terrain. Landscape design is complicit in obeying jurisdictional authorities in order to rule over the landscape. The land and the people end up being strategically separated between spaces of consumption and production.

The negation of place is closely linked to the negation of indigenous bodies, knowledge, and human rights; if you can deny or distort ideas about Indian bodies or culture, you make it much easier to rationalize or justify the theft of land from a population deemed savage, incompetent, or vanished

Deborah A. Miranda

CURRENT CONDITION

Contained Pond:

- “English garden” looking pond - Contained - Piping - Engineering system - Maintenance and oxygenation

- No room for compression and decompression

Piping for oxygenation

PROPOSAL

Treaty with the land:

- No artificial system - No piping -No need for oxygenation -Creek expands and contracts as needed

Treaty with the soil:

- Pockets of wetland - Hydric soil

- Gabion walls for dispersal of water + oxygenation

-Microenvironment

Treaty with the water:

- Terraces as levees

- Landscape as containment for flooding events

Creek Wetland Floodplain

The proposal seeks to create a Treaty with the Land by removing the engineering that maintains water quality. A flat surface with a rock bottom creates a wetland condition. Gabions work as surfaces for water dispersal and oxygenation.

In this focus area, the system uses the gabion wall as a device to frame the main entrance to the Arboretum. Moments of compression and decompression using the vegetation to separate the public realm from the private realm.

This focus area is designed as a set of pockets within a woodland of American legacies such as Longleaf Pine, American Chestnut, and Oaks, to create a system of terraces that allows outdoor classrooms to take place.

Grounding territories with their treaties and renewing relations by building alliances and embodying anticolonial measures means redesigning a eurocentric Botanical Garden.

In the context of Davis Arboretum, this means renegotiating design so the Landscape Architecture that shapes our Arboretum is oriented towards social justice through a treaty with the land

Steelframe Structure

RESHAPING THE INFORMAL: PROGRESSIVE ARCHITECTURE BY MODULES

According to UN Habitat, 113 million people live in informal settlements in Latin America. This project targets the most fundamental problem of these communities: the lack of quality and habitable conditions in their homes.

After analyzing their idiosyncrasy, a system of progressive and modular architecture was developed. Modules of 3x3m could be placed together and combined, giving families multiple possibilities of deciding the houses’ shape. Furthermore, by being progressive, the family could add more modules and spaces as their necessities and resources grow.

2019

An urban explosion of economic growth has produced dramatic marginalization resulting in the expansion of slums. This polarization in the communities, together with social and economic inequities, has produced places of social and urban conflict.

The cities in our country, are dividing our citizens

There is a fundamental need to reorganize the social and economic relationships that have shapped Latin American cities today. Designing from the bottom-up was at the core of this project.

“The best ideas in the shaping of the city in the future will not come from enclaves of economic power and abundance, but in fact from sectors of conflict and scarcity from which an urgent imagination can really inspire us to rethink the urban growth today.” Teddy Cruz

In Latin America 113 million people live in informal settlements 16% of the Colombian population live in this condition

In Bogotá, Colombia’s capital, 230,000 people, live in the slums

plasticidad

resiliencia

Imagen 7: Arquitectura informal enfrentada a la idiosincrasia de la informalidad

PLANNING FOR THE FUTURE GROWTH OF BOGOTA

After the 1980’s the demographic explosion and the need for new infrastructure, wetlands and natural reserves were completely manipulated in order to be used as the ground for the construction and expansion of Bogotá, Colombia’s capital and the 4th largest city in Latin America.

This project seeks to inmagine the ways in which the future expansion of Bogotá could happen with its main River at its center. The approach to this project started by studying and analyzing the river and its impact on the underserved population that lives around it.

By mapping this information and using it as a tool for the proposal, the project aimed at transforming River Bogotá from a city border into a city center. Branches designed to be green metropolitan corridors would come out of the River and into the city changing the relationship the city has towards this ecological structure and the community that lives at its border.

SAMPLES

USACE Inland Waterways and their Dredging Volumes by Districts

Mapping of the average annual volume of dredged material in inland waterway USACE

used to make this map was taken from the Army Corps of Engineers

and

web page. The data showed dredged volumes by district in fiscal years. This information was analyzed, processed and converted from Microsoft Excel format, and

into

as points for spatial and geographic interpretation.

KANSAS

LITTLE

TULSA

DETROIT DISTRICT Average Annual Volumes 1,361,266 CY/Y

CHICAGO DISTRICT Average Annual Volumes 199,070 CY/Y

LOUISVILLE DISTRICT Average Annual Volumes 6,895,573 CY/Y

HUNTINGTON DISTRICT Average Annual Volumes 245,139 CY/Y

NASHVILLE DISTRICT No Data

MEMPHIS DISTRICT Average Annual Volumes

MOBILE DISTRICT Average Annual Volumes 10,109,879

Data

This map compares the relationship between tonnage in the Port of Mobile, AL and the top 10 U.S. ports between 1980-2019. The chart compares historic data for these major points and the significant difference in tonnage between Port of Houston, TX and the Port of Mobile, AL.

Relationship between Tonnage in the Port of Mobile, AL and the top 10 U.S. Ports in 2019

The Alhambra / Granada, Spain / Jan 2019

The Alhambra / Granada, Spain / Jan 2019

Alcazar of Segovia / Segovia, Spain / Sept 2018

The Alhambra / Granada, Spain / Jan 2019

TRAVEL PHOTOGRAPHY SAMPLES

“Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s OK. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.” -Anthony Bourdain

Tenerife Auditorium / Canary Islands, Spain / Nov 2018