Marantha Dawkins

Given the sharp contrast between the period of relative calm we have lived in for the past century and the incapacity of the built environment to contend with increasingly powerful environmental forces, this dissertation asks how scientific models, the natural world, and the failure of infrastructure to unify the two can inform the contemporary project of climate adaptation.

 

This is a project that is by necessity both theoretical and experimental because the end of the world is both an ideological ordering mechanism and a material question, each informed by the other. Through applied experiments on the Mid-Atlantic coast designing novel natural infrastructures, this research explores methods for designing high-causality landscapes in the context of climate change. It discusses both the epistemological challenge and the methodological potential of mashing disparately scaled and differently paced sciences together: the physics of the whole earth, made possible by extensive computational power; and contemporary infrastructure, made possible by political necessity and bad science.

 

This research contends that landscape design can bind energy into larger climatic systems and in so doing, can use climate change as an engine for complexification. Coupling landscape and climate in service of coevolution and networked feedback can set into motion processes in which the emergent property is a kind of intelligence. In this way, climate adaptation can be a living process built into earth systems rather than a simple question of problem and response.

 

Bio:

 

Marantha Dawkins is a PhD candidate in the department of Landscape Architecture. Her work explores how the design of landscape dynamics can structure climate futures. She has a master’s degree in urban design from Carnegie Mellon University, and a bachelor’s in landscape architecture from Cornell University. Before coming to the University of Virginia she worked as an architectural researcher and taught in the architecture program at Carnegie Mellon University. Dawkins’s work explores the role of climate models, the ideology of climate risk, theories of ecological complexity, and nature-based infrastructural techniques through applied experiments that test scales, media, and methods for climate adaptation. Her research calls for epistemological and methodological shifts in the design of infrastructure: a living and changing, rather than stable and mechanistic, model for adaptation and evolution. Her research has been presented and published at venues including CERF, ACADIA, CELA, AMPS, IAAC, and ACSA.