DESIGN IN AN OCEAN OF WETNESS Habitation beyond a Troubled Earth Surface

We live in an all-consuming Ocean. Its wetness is everywhere in the air, earth, sea, flora and fauna, precipitating, evaporating, storming, seeping, soaking, transpiring, osmoting, freezing. We are wetness ourselves, our wetness necessary to our existence. However, we do not learn that we live in an Ocean of Wetness. We learn that we live on an Earth surface called land served by water: water tasked with supplying and draining land, providing it with energy, transportation, and lucrative waterfronts; water that occasionally protests its subjugation with floods, droughts, and leaks.

In this talk, I present land as a product of design—a posited surface drawn with a line to separate and confine water, set to a time, and articulated with landscape. It serves as a ground of observation, habitation, civilization and a colonization. Today, it is a surface in trouble from climate change and its consequences in sea level rise, melting glaciers, floods, mass migrations, species extinction, and wars. These are not problems to solve. They are calls to review a design project. Does an Ocean of Wetness offer an alternative?

Speakers

Dilip da Cunha, Architect & Design activist 

Adjunct Professor GSAPP, Columbia University