This was a studio treated political power as the issue of ecology, and juxtaposed military and power with the environmental topic in the scale of territories. If I am asked to recommend one studio that can represent the landscape professional education in the building, I will definitely choose this one.

 

Students were separated into groups to study different US military bases, and every group was required to demonstrate their works in an exhibition way during the final presentation. I was allocated to the group studies VAFB -- the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Used to be the home of Chumash, this piece of land was colonized and occupied by the Spanish, the Mexican and the US army chronologically. The falling down of underground water level, the prosperous fruit industry, the cows brought by the Spanish centuries ago, all together made it a complex ecological crisis on the territory. To study the relationship of these powers and to project new scenario for the region by design approaches became the main goal of this studio.

 

There were two parts of the works: narration and intervention. I made several collage pictures as my narrative storyboard to reveal the paradoxical relationship between those stakeholders, and designed intervention infrastructure such as check dam and seeding machine to improve the ecological process of the territory.

 

In the concept of "Exhibition as Design", we projected the months-long discussions of global scale issues in the framework of military bases, to the comparatively tiny space of Piper Auditorium, for allowing a further communication of the ecology of power.