Beyond Beautification

• In Event: Remediating Remediation: Imagining Alternatives for Assessing and Redressing Environmental Harm - I

Abstract

Remediation is an expanding topic in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, and urbanism. There is heightened awareness among design professionals that repercussions of creative decision-making ripple out from short-term projects. Emerging demand for innovative proposals that address environmental harm calls for a deliberate crossing of ideas between fields of architecture, art, and science. As the traditional delineation of roles related to the built and the natural continue to blur, new connections between disciplines are necessary to navigate a changing technological, environmental, and globally connected world. Past theories and ideals of beautification, as a process focused on making visual improvements to a site, do not go deep enough. Time reveals the realities of environments cannot be erased, over-written, and homogenized by design, and issues will continue to resurface and interrupt.

This paper explores speculative remediation practices in the built environment that dig deeper into the messy and intermingled relationships of care and neglect between dispersed actors, touching on emerging contemporary theory guiding architectural thought. This will include the presentation of a series of explorative design projects that propose alternative remediation schemes for geographies in need of imaginative approaches. Formats of representation offer tools to speculate on the future and find agency in the “media” of remediation. Each proposal is a vehicle to provoke a broader dialogue on the capacity to share knowledge, engage diverse fields of study, and raise questions on what generations, audiences and species can be designed for and communicated to.

Author

• Monica Britt Hutton, Massachusetts Institute of Technology