Overview
To be “in the hurricane” is to live and work with shoreline erosion, droughts, and intense storms—it is to recognize how the contemporary climate crisis transcends all and entangles us collectively in its gyre. We live in a time of collective disorientation that affects marginalized communities, often land-dependent ones more than others.
The CCA-Mellon Multidisciplinary Research Program seeks new and urgent modes of orientation that ask earthbound designers and their allies to ground and value land: lands held by others in care and lands that have been claimed, reclaimed, and not ceded. It is a call to undertake research and design projects that are site-specific, climate-dependent, historically attuned, and collaborative. As a collective and all-encompassing state, being “in the hurricane” calls for grounded, land-caring practices that match the intensity of the storm.
Land-dependent design practices that focus on shaping land through social and ecological relationships hold the potential to create, support, and advocate for lands that ensure our survival in an increasingly divided world. This call seeks practitioners and researchers working across landscape architecture, architecture, and allied practices who value how land is anchored by community building, situated interventions, and defined by everyday ecological realities. It seeks to foreground regenerative land practices that cut across disciplinary boundaries between architects and landscape architects to centre ecological conditions such as soil health, geology, botany, and more.
The practices of land-dependent designers are central to the CCA-Mellon Multidisciplinary Research Program. To this end, we seek proposals about specific, real-world sites that engage communities with ties and commitments to land and solicit projects that do this intentionally over time and with a view toward relationship building. Projects that are urgent, grounded, redefine land-based practices, and emphasize site-specific concerns and community members will form the grounds of research, collaboration, and intervention suggested by the concept of being “in the hurricane.”
In line with this practice-based orientation, this call also invites researchers who approach land-dependent design from historical and theoretical perspectives. Environmental historians, political ecologists, and environmental lawyers would all possess expertise that could give dimensionality to lands that are under threat. Their knowledge would also align with the program’s ambition to foreground issues that disregard conventional academic and disciplinary boundaries and shape new forms of thought and collective practice.
Finally, with its emphasis on urgency and specificity, this program welcomes applications that foreground land dependent-design as a mode of collective action that can address the current material manifestations of the climate crisis. The program seeks participants who are willing to probe and redraw the social and professional boundaries of architecture and landscape architecture to advance a shared method for navigating the aftermaths of un/natural disasters. Applications should develop historical and theoretical precision on how land-based interventions can become a form of public advocacy and activism, either today, in the past, or looking toward the future.
Research Program Highlights
- Collaborative research and design projects
- Site-specific, climate-dependent, and historically attuned approaches
- Emphasis on regenerative land practices and ecological realities
- Engagement with community ties and commitments to land
- Intersection of architecture, landscape architecture, and ecology
- Exploration of urgent, real-world sites and historical contexts
Key Topics
- Rethinking landscape architecture in response to the climate crisis
- Learning from regenerative land practices
- Indigenous and marginalized communities’ relationship with land
- Collective memory, displacement, and landholding
- Survival as a design philosophy
- Land politics and ecological change
- Historical perspectives on land and environmental issues
Application Process
The CCA-Mellon Multidisciplinary Research Program invites practitioners, researchers, and cultural producers to join. Apply by October 2nd with a proposal outlining your research/design work’s significance and impact. The application should include a voice note answering the questions:
- What does being “in the hurricane” mean to you?
- How do you define a land-based intervention?
Program Structure
- Mellon Seminar (Online, November 2023): 16 shortlisted applicants share individual projects, set project terms, and establish field commonalities. All participants receive a $1000 stipend.
- Mellon Multidisciplinary Research Project (In-person Workshops): 8 selected Mellon Researchers engage in an 18-month project. Funding includes a $12,000 stipend, a $3500 research allowance, and airfare. The project involves workshops and research in various locations.
Leadership and Advisors
- Convenors: Giovanna Borasi, Director, CCA & Rafico Ruiz, Associate Director, Research, CCA
- External Advisors: Azzurra Cox, Gustafson Guthrie Nichol & Jane Mah Hutton, University of Waterloo & Momoyo Kaijima, ETH Zurich/Atelier Bow Wow
