MIST LAB
ABOUT THE MIST LAB —
The technological surge of the past thirty years has drastically influenced how we conceptualize, analyze, and design urban environments. In parallel, the largely hidden infrastructural landscapes that enable these technological advances entail an outsized environmental footprint and maintain uneven power relationships at a planetary scale. The Media, Infrastructure, Speculative Territories Laboratory (MIST lab) synthesizes a critical study of the socio-spatial dynamics of emerging media and infrastructural systems with the speculative re-imagination of their spatial forms and territorial imprints. Through projective design projects and interdisciplinary research, the work of the lab examines the complex interrelationship between media, infrastructure, and urbanization, to generate new knowledge, novel methodologies, and radical visions for our collective urban future.
LAB DIRECTOR —
Ali Fard, Assistant Professor, Architecture [afard@virginia.edu]
CURRENT RESEARCH PROJECTS AT MIST LAB —
NOVA-22
NOVA-22 aims to build a projective atlas of urbanization in Northern Virginia. Using the Washington and Old Dominion (W&OD) trail as the spine of its investigation, the project will be conducted in two phases. In the first phase, the urban landscapes along the W&OD will be explored through six overlapping analytic layers: history, geography, physical structures, aerial imagery, data fields, and forces & relationships. In the second phase, a series of speculative spatial narratives will reimagine the future of urbanization in the region in response to emerging social, environmental, and technological challenges. The project employs multimedia representation and speculative fiction as critical devices that expand the communicative capacity of design research.
Project Team: Ali Fard (UVA, Architecture, PI)
Research Assistants: Yiming Zhang (BSArch '24), Vishal Jain (MUD '24), Haoran Zhang (BSArch '23), Irem Cetin (MArch '23)
Funding: UVA Office of Sustainability; UVA School of Architecture
GROUNDING THE CLOUD
Grounding the Cloud is a web project and an upcoming book, that explores the spatial and urban imprints of data platforms. By examining the heavy dependence of data and its production on material geographies and spatial processes that are at the core of the planetary urban condition, the project indexes and critically unpacks the spatial typologies and urban ideologies that maintain and expand the territorial reach of tech platforms. Through fieldwork, writing, photography, mappings, videos, drawings, and other analytic media, Grounding the Cloud tethers the transcendent ideology of the cloud back to the ground.
Learn more at the project website.
Project Team: Ali Fard (UVA, Architecture, PI)
Research Assistants: Chenjie Xiong (MUEP '20), Tian Wang (MLA '20), Ted Bazil (MArch '19), Ziyuan Yang (MLA '20)
Funding: UVA School of Architecture
SUPPORTED COURSES —
MIST Lab supports courses across the Departments of Architecture, Urban and Environmental Planning, and Landscape Architecture, as well as the Urban Design program, connecting curriculum and research. These courses include:
Advanced Research Studios (graduate and undergraduate) take on semester-long investigations into infrastructure and its urban disposition in specific contexts. Research Seminars extend the intellectual and critical role of design research in relationship to emerging technologies and their spatial imprints. Representation and Computation courses experiment with various emerging media to expand on the representational and communication capacities of architecture in the context of the increasing complexity of urban environments.