What machination predicts the conclusion? The fallen tree, the illusion of time gained in the leaf ’s descent. The emboldened ember encroaching the dry past Repent in admiration, construct your image fast.
Patrick Riley Syracuse University Bachelors of Architecture Thesis 2022 Advisors: Emily Pellicano Ted Brown Julia Czerniak
National parks are valuable sites of American
most romanticize the past and present states.
culture and complex ecosystems. Rich with history and
Researching American national parks requires the
diverse flora and fauna, these parks are resilient
past, present, and future. New representations are
havens of American nature. However, these sites, and
approached as a mixture of the park’s factual
all natures, are threatened by worsening climate
histories and historic representations balanced
conditions. The West Coast’s Yosemite National Park
with projections of the future.
is a cultural icon and core site of national
Seeking imaginings of the foreign and
interests in preservation. Yet it too is repeatedly
undiscovered, artificial image productions,
challenged by fires at increasingly greater scales
utilizing text- and image-to-image and style
and extremities incurred by climate change.
transfer technologies, offer the ability to
This crisis will escalate, turning calculations of
defamiliarize the known. Designed as a parafictional
future devastation into a permanent reality.
atlas, image fabrication of Yosemite National Park
In response, architecture has the agency to
is guided by a fictional documentary narrative
create potent imagery, to demystify the climate
designed to present future projections as fact.
crisis, rendering the danger and effects of these
Visually and textually capturing the tense
elemental conditions in order to evoke an emotional
temporality and archived physicality of Yosemite
response and protect America’s cultural icons.
can inform and grow emotional investment to
Current representations of these natures are
the future of American natures.
critiqued as ineffective at connecting with audiences.
Audiences therefore approach the familiar as
While different types of media may portray
foreign. Representations can translate the power
national parks with distinct intentions, such as
of cultural icons and disasters to tangible issues
tourism, preservation, reporting, and documentation,
commanding immediate reflection and responses.
Table of Contents Chapter I: Flora, Fields, & Facades
Chapter II: Folly in a Fervent Forest
Chapter III: Fear an d Flood in the Fog
Chapter IV: Forms in the Fickle Flashes
Chapter V: The Finale of the Fourberie
STRANGE VINES & GRASSES
The Scientist:
Analytical, methodological, and astutely observational, the Scientist is attuned to the “how’s” and “why’s” as they explore this unfamiliar world.
Growth Pattern of the “Roisvend enrapsa”
The Artist:
phase i Identified by prickly, swamp-green nopales, the petals begin to overgrow the stem’s capacity.
phase iv Nopale growth dominates the whole body. These can be identified from afar by their sculptural quality.
phase ii The blood-red hue emerges as blooming petals take bulbous forms. The stem is burdened by extraneous nopales.
phase v “Roisvend enrapsa” intrude onto nearby flora. Excess secretions from “consumption” result in blinding glows from its petals.
phase iii Petals multiply at an exponential rate, erupting into a large bush. Nopales continue to gather as an underbrush.
phase vi Full encapsulation results in a lightless space. Unidentified noises appear to echo out. They have been described as “gutteral”.
Verbose, romantic, and empathetic, the Artist connects the Crew’s interloping to their new context, speaking their mind solely through the use of poetry.
The Mercenary:
Anxious and especially focused on the Crew’s survival through the unknown, the Mercenary is the spatial spearhead of the group; their eyes are alert.
Flora, Fields, & Facades
EASY TO CUT
Violent bi-pedal creatures walked among us,
The Philosopher:
Poetic, existential, and concept-driven, the Philosopher assists in repositioning the Crew’s human existence in this world’s hierarchy through speculation and theory.
Beginning their travels through this new world, our four explorers encounter foreign flora, open fields, and the entrance to a preserved nature. Finding archaic architecture mimicking the forms of nature, the group rests for the night at a nearby hut in the surrounding forest.
murdering us.
We watched as we fell
to the ashen soil.
One step. Two step. Three. Metal cleaving through the brush with a clean rhythm. Thistles dropped into my hands as the rest gathered in mounds at our feet. The thick needles were smooth and so so sharp. Finally, the dense bushes grew sparser and sparser. An opening revealed itself to us. I paused. Memories bubbled.
Crimson beginnings, encumber the trodden. Forgotten sinnings, evidenced, in instance, by blooming trimmings on a soiled earth. Ashen, bloody, the body lays prostrate to birth a lineage of retributions, of branches of binary failures and solutions. The primal primary process repeats ad infinitum, minus old voices and vices. Catch the silent screams. Hear the heartbeats hum.
I led the charge against this cumbersome brush and we emerged into a large field. Vigilance was key. They were taking too long staring at these flowers and we needed to move faster. Remaining in an open field could be dangerous. Yet still it was absurd. What could we possibly fear? We finally crested the last hill.
Large breaths and
our
chest
heaves. Fresh footsteps.
Trespassers,
violaters. Our friends
“Mumanth chrysake”
recoil.
Ascending the last earthly wave, the vast landscape truly revealed itself. The scope was beyond comprehension. Mountains rose from soil to graze the heavens. We are miniscule. Yet we observed, at long last, a lone path to guide our wayward trek. A sea of grass walked by comrades slowly turned to a solid path. Suddenly, foul smog and smoke arose from the canopy and surged through the air at our band.
coiling ethereal twisting hazy scorching A graze of a touch and I enflame.
“Crybalst fluer”
A whisper of a breath and I ensnare.
Coughing, wheezing, smoke grown from wisps whisks our breath away. And these senses missed amidst this mist of grievous heat afloat, which renders flesh aflame, cause us to stray as each our throat constricts from the smog born of the evening day. Children of the afternoon are escorted by the wind, a soothing touch compared to that scalding of the skin. Sullen footsteps lay the mood, a misery seared in mind. A world so cruel and crude, our path together stretches so far ahead and behind.
The afternoon heat harshly emanated from the concrete burning our soles. It encouraged longer strides and faster steps, quickly turning the day into an approaching evening as we encountered semblances of architecture in the near distance. Webbing stretched across the ground, an infectious life creeping onto every surface in reach. The night finally approached as we neared these foreign designs. The darkness was repelled by crimson lights, casting a hellish glow onto every brick. Staring at these ruins from afar, the facade’s composition appeared almost cellular. The structures stretched and curved similar to a tree’s roots or a leaf’s vascular system, like the earth itself had refashioned these remnants into forgeries.
FOUND FLORA SAMPLE HOT TO THE TOUCH
Weight bears down as the world rotates beneath me, my every component working tirelessly to resist
the quaking earth, the endless flame, the monstrous gales, and the torrential rains.
In infinite forms, I suffer. I am weary. I resent callused hands.
WOODEN RECLUSE
IS SAFE
Growth Pattern of the “Infora ernoff”
phase i Arachnid-like shoots split off from its main stem, arcing around its soft, but hot to the touch, spores.
phase iii The primary stem unwraps. Its tipped nutrients, having spread throughout the body, give its new stems a dark red hue.
Folly in a Fervent Forest phase ii Shoots defensively wrap around the stems, creating a thick cocoon. Spores gather at the tip, as crimson essential fluids collect at the tip.
phase iv Its essential fluids now flow evenly throughout the body and its hue increases in vibrancy. What gives the fern its energy?
phase v Its petals are a saturated crimson, said to have absorbed the blood of fauna from the soil. Triple rings denote its hellish nature from afar. It reproduces by shooting the spores at its tip into the air. Coated in its secretions, the spores appear to be highly flammable and prone to combustion while airborne.
Awoken in the early morning by a roaring wildfire, the group experiences intense flames and heat. Fleeing to the craggy mountains, they escape the inferno and appreciate the vast land from their perch on the mountain plateau. Peacefully pausing and collecting field research on new flora, they prepare to descend into the valley between the mountains.
I jolted from a deep sleep with screaming bellows. The heat was monstrous, yet the wildfire was still so far away. We seized our packs and ran, and ran, and ran from the hellscape licking at our heels. The world was an inferno and the ground itself became scarred from those touches of flame. Our eyes frantically scanned the forest, finally noticing an empty field in the distance.
Ravenous and squirming, Molten tendrils reaching, hollowing the earth to consume, to devour.
I am insatiable. As my chest heaves, as each breath is my last, I paw at the ground for each morsel.
The root, the leaf. The splinter, the timber. The trunk, the forest. The flower, the earth.
I yearn. I will not yield.
The finite fiery maw, flaming consumption as the mind registers what the eyes saw. Shock, surprise, awoken, as the built becomes broken, as the searing caress undoes what a human does. And we scramble and bolt because it burns.
Our lifeblood transfigured into a nightmarish haze. Foreign but familiar
soles tread our ground. Our eternal, hallowed earth.
Our soiled heavens. Suffering normalized.
“Verna gickubits” The wobbling of its perched bud in the wind is reminiscent of airborne fauna. Primarily jet-black, it often is well hidden against its backdrop. Our bodies aching and scarred, we persisted across field after field to finally escape the fire in the mountains. As we trudged and slowly ascended, the thick fog around our heads was pierced by intense light. Peeling away the opaque sky and reaching the summit’s plateau, we paused at sight of the land before us. At last granted respite, we recouped at this calm earth, studying the flora around us.
Fear and Flood in the Fog “Tarpol tuhmo” Often found in darkest corners, or simply under dense bushes, the ringed center of this flora is a completely different flower than the rest of its body. Combined with its circular bud, it is often nicknamed as the “Wormhole Flower”.
“Doppea tinga” Barely balancing a ballooning bud on its unproportional stem, this flora stands tall in the sky as a large mass of growth. While it is often joked about, it also occassionally rains bones that fall from its fleshy folds. Maybe I shouldn’t touch it...
Descending from our restful plateau, the craggy mountains soon arose around us, their faces and spires looming down. What life exists in this wilderness?
Descending into the valley, the four explorers are met with a pervading fog, clouding their vision. Surrounded by the roar of waterfalls pouring down, the water pooling up to their calves, they explore the marshland. Discovering a most curious new form of life, their watery travels are cut short by an incoming flood casting them out.
Reaching the valley’s floor, a cold shiver trembles my spine. A dense fog has enveloped the area. Is this the domain of death?
Pooling and swirling,
DENSE ATMOSPHERE GRANODIORITE ROCK
WATERFALLS: 90 DECIBELS
“Cardinal ghint”
The young solar light pokes beams through the older fog, comforting the fright from the flora. Tendrils invade this bog of mist and mildew, gifting the horror of a grazing touch, as we wade through the unknown. The silence, so much, from crushing falls. The cascades hide, in the distance, whether we are alone.
in surges and free f a
l l.
I gather with brethren, disjointed
by eternal space, breaching time.
The cyclical return to the dripping, to the journey, to
the foreign body “Truscaceous clath”
divorcing
the connection.
Surrounding us, I notice bulbous mounds of slick, gel-like flora sprouting from the waterbed. Calling everyone’s attention, I hack the hanging vines away. The veil pulled back, we find groves upon groves of this newfound life as far as we could see, their silhouettes countless.
Water gushes and floods from every rock face. It would be beautiful if not unnerving; no other sounds breach the roar of the falls. But the rest of my senses are heightened. Our bodies rock with the current, the impact of all the cascades creating a tumultuous body of water that we are forced to wander, with careful steps. I pause at what I see surrounding the watery depths.
Submerged,
wrapped in an aquatic embrace. The water surges between my folds. A soothing connection,
challenged, and anxious, by eight eyes.
but we are
The observing gaze, a disturbance to the calm.
Energy coursing to the core, routed to components touched before, and after, nutrients given, graciously, the body grows faster.
The biggest bud falls free
Growth Pattern of the “Muahn wasedee”
phase i Gathering and storing nutrients in its small bud, commonly six feet deep underwater, the bud pulsates as it reaches for the surface of the water. The final size of phase i buds seems to fluctuate...
phase iii Falling deeper into the depths of the water, the flora takes a bulkier form. Excess leaves detach and grow into common plants around the core.
I watch as the silhouettes of the buds sway with the currents, absorbing what the water offers, the blades of these sea vegetables pulsating with the flow. What have these flora seen? What history have they borne witness to?
phase ii Phase i buds that fail to grow exponentially instead appear to lose stem height and take on a multiple curvature form, with leaves beginning to flatten against the stem.
phase iv Now planted firmly on the Benthic Zone of the water body, the flora mimics a human silhouette in prayer. Does the energy source of the flora change in the growth process?
As we stare at the expanse of life, I find a bud far bigger than the rest, seeming to levitate high above the water line. What new life takes form outside our eyes?
CRASHES INTO WATER
LOUD LOUD LOUD
RESULT: TSUNAMI INCOMING
Flooded out of the valley, I stand and gasp for air in the shallow waters of the newfound shore. As we emerge and trudge onto the short-grassed clearing, we raise our heads to acknowedge the looming forest before us, the afternoon sun casting a soothing, warm glow. Perhaps we may finally be somewhat ease.
Forms in the Fickle Flashes
Reluctantly, but propelled by the journey behind us, we begin to step foot along a small trail. “Sierra Snow”
Pushed out of the valley by a flood, the four explorers are pushed to the edge of a grove of sequoia trees. Standing at monstrous heights, mutated in form with twisting trunks and melting bark, the group explores this transformed forest and its shifting canopy. The earth and its life have been transformed beyond recognition and shadowy silhouettes seem to stalk our explorers between the sunlight and darkness.
The shifting sunlight from the forest’s canopy ominously lights the way as the soil path gives way to raw forest. Leaves crunching and a rock-ridden earth are the worst qualities of the journey by far, although the undulating ground feels unnatural. We pause at a brief clearing. There are such strange and misshapenly formed trees here, in dense formations. What is this place home to?
Sorrowfully shapen bark of shadows, risen from the liquid land. What courses through your veins? Who sculpted you with such a hand? Tremors and terrors train trunks into transfigured trees. What life is not a victim, no exception to these, by raging torrents and flames, captured eternal, by poets like me, in all forms of the humanities?
SUNLIT DAY TURNS TO ENVELOPING DARKNESS GUIDED BY TREE SILHOUETTES
HYPERDENSE TREE CANOPY BLOCKS LIGHT
Pushing forward with the most careful of steps, the canopy above finally begins to thin. The dense forest wanes, strands of sunlight peeking through like searchlights scanning the rolling ground. Flashes in my periphery. Figures in the shadows came into focus and faded out again, blocked by the solar encroachment
Growth Pattern of the “Freundigtras swahod”
phase i Beginning deep in the earth, the teardrop buds absorb what nutrients of everything around them to slowly push through the soil to the surface.
phase iii Its buds now fully formed, the whole body breaches the earth. The petals flare out, it greedily reaches for its own sunlight after its earthen submersion.
phase ii The wrung-out roots of neighboring flora surround the newly-formed stem and fresh buds. With a thicker stem, the young flora grows very close to the surface.
phase iv As the flora begins to absorb solar radiation, its body is untrained in processing direct exposure to its primary energy source. Its body begins to morph in excess energy.
Bursting in solar waves,
reflected,
collected,
admired.
My fluorescent shafts puncture t h r o u g h the floral shield, absorbed by the life of the soil below. Warm gratitude.
The revealing light.
The omnipresent hearth.
phase v Its growth has been exponential, leading to self cannibalization and its sapping of surrounding life’s nutrients. The unbalanced exposure of direct ultraviolet light, due to the shifting density of the tree canopies, transmutes its innate beauty.
Silhouettes in the shadows float between trunks, like whispers on the wind that brush grasses in the meadows. Fade away at the touch of the sun, like petals of the dying blossom. Impermanent impertinence to veins of blood and the solar, we witness these ashore flotsam, our brethren. Heart afire at the sight of our polar. Blocked by the spatial, the temporal; hierarchy in swing, increase our glacial pace to reposition. Aggression is no concern, merely a poor decision. It is all in the then and now.
Emerging from the blinding light, we stepped into a small clearing, the cliff edge a sheer drop a few feet away. As we adjusted our eyes to the bare sun, and its reflections off metal plates in the near distance, we began to recognize the sighted landmark.
SOLAR ASCENSION
The Finale of the Fourberie FOREST ENDS
BRIGHT BRIGHT BRIGHT
Evading the mystery and terror of the grove and its silhouettes, the four explorers emerge from the forest and are blinded by the change in sunlight. Adjusting their eyes and comprehending the site before them, although technologically evolved over time, they grasp the reality, and its implications, that they live in.
Gushing water the same as the day it opened, ahead was the unmistakeable.
We had arrived at
Yosemite National Park’s
O’Shaughnessy Dam.