'Edge Ecologies' is a theoretical and speculative design-research project that explores wasteland ecologies through the morphology of the edge--a physical manifestation of a dynamic play of human and more-than-human actors over centuries.
The terrain of Glasgow--from the airport to the Kilpatrick Hills--is here milled and cut, set on shifting stands of waste metal representative of speculative tessellations (edges) created to explore these typological morphologies of 'wasteland.' This work is part of a series of models focused on malleability, and the act of creating through making or, in this case, making through unmaking.
A reinterpretation of the dynamic edge ecologies representative of the socioecological context in which these spaces are formed and exist, this work moves beyond the analysis of space and posits speculative, radical futures of the post-industrial. Inspired by drosscape theory, which suggests that all urban landscapes are the result of defunct capitalistic processes, this model creates an evolutionary means of creating dynamic space through imposing decompositional edges, or cuts. Borrowing the architectural practice of massing by exploding buildings to recreate form, the landscape itself is here exploded to recreate tectonic futures of speculative wastelands.
Edges epitomize urban wastelands, the ecologies of which transcend eco-centric perspectives of the science to incorporate the human element. They reveal a physical manifestation of the dynamic city that has spanned generations—both amalgamations of ‘here-and-nows’, as well as ‘then-and-theres’ of a cohesive cultural landscape by natures of filling the voids where the human element is removed but the infrastructure remains.
In a world where the discourse of our profession consistently promotes erasure through design with rhetoric that totes the “revitalisation” of space, “placemaking,” exploring indeterminate, non-static design through speculative—perhaps dystopian—futures has enabled me to challenge practice and contemporary urban design ethos.
For more information on this project, please read about the comprehensive body of work here: https://issuu.com/giuliamorrone/docs/gmorrone_s2133567_workbook