Sea-Change: Agential Landscapes and the Architectural Process

Abstract

This thesis proposes a sea-change in design thinking towards a methodology that builds an iterative, fluid, entangled, and discursive understanding of the architectural process, one that is better suited for the uncertain and rapidly changing future of our particular moment in time. It proposes a way of working and thinking that embraces the agency of materials, landscapes, histories and time as design partners, and proposes an architecture of questions and conversations, rather than singular solutions or answers. The thesis explored coastal Alaska and Iceland as case studies through a series of material apparatuses, and used collage as a generative and discursive methodology in this world of entanglement, metamorphosis and scalar relationships.