E-63

Aaron Koopal
Oliver Goche

Third year BARCH studio Instructor: Roman Chikerinets
2019


Our project, E-63, seeks to document, record, archive, and preserve the midwestern landscape through various means. These modes of documentation include the archiving of objects and the stories that are connected to them, projections of phenomena from throughout the landscape, as well as data from an already semi-in-place infrastructure that can record the landscape down to the micro-scale of a singular seed. With this, we recognize that the region is rapidly changing in violent and existential ways as a result of mono-agricultural production, desertification, and an increasing strain on underground aquifers. From this, we have begun to imagine what the future of midwestern landscapes look like; one where a dust bowl has wiped out much of the existing ecological and cultural phenomena in the midwest, thus the reasoning for our architecture. Through a multitude of research we began to realize that this landscape, and it’s ecology, is directly intertwined with the culture that encompasses it. By hypothesizing the future of data collection and it’s parallels to agricultural production, we sought to see how these stories, phenomena, and data may continue to be recorded for our posterity in the event that the midwestern landscape we recognize today isn’t around anymore due to the existential threats it faces.