I'll be joining the faculty at @harvardgsd and @gsd_mla next year as the 2025-2026 Daniel Urban Kiley Teaching Fellow! Looking forward to working with students, faculty, and staff on planty research and design, and cooking up courses with friends, new and old!!!! Small project description from the announcement below.
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The Daniel Urban Kiley Teaching Fellowship is awarded to an emerging designer who demonstrates a promising trajectory towards consequential work in the design of the urban public realm, and builds upon the GSD’s history of pedagogic innovation as well as the Department of Landscape Architecture’s century of leadership in landscape education. The Kiley Fellow is appointed Lecturer in Landscape Architecture for the academic year and is awarded via global search on an annual or semi-annual basis.
As the 2025 Kiley Fellow, Sonia will focus on two projects examining and critiquing how plants and information systems intertwine. Drawing from the plant sciences, Sonia will create a digital catalog of bioindicator plants sensitive to environmental pollution that are endemic to the Northeast. With current representational tools, environmental toxicity and landscape change is often difficult to represent, meaning designers typically work with pollution as an abstract, invisible unknown. The digital catalog will serve as a representational tool for landscape designers to better communicate how plant growth and death can be understood as evidence, or as real-time information, of environmental change. In addition to this project, Sonia will probe into the histories of plant bioindicator research and emerging digital plant collections management software in the 1960s. She intends to explore how in this period—a moment of burgeoning computational power and new theories of ecosystems—conceptualizing plant information systems was a process shaped both by technological progress and the local knowledge of landscape and scientific workers. Through this work, Sonia aims to reframe plants not as benign, ordered objects relegated to the “natural,” but instead as subjects that might help us to reconsider value and labor in the built environment.
A wilting Golden Columbine, from "Run Dry" with @bizarro_slmn and rendered on a zeer pot-cooled computer. 🥀
Teaching a seminar this semester titled "Plant Remains: Representing Disturbance through Digital Media" at @gsd_mla in which we will explore ways to dirty up our sanitized, lush digital asset landscapes with ugly, dying and wilting plants. Examining the remains of plants in herbaria and plants that remain in disturbed landscapes, we're going to work through ways that plant death is both informational and inevitable, learn animation skills, spend time with wonderful guests, and visit plant collections living and dead.
@bizarro_slmn and my piece, "Run Dry: Digital Infrastructure and Landscape Loss in Mesa, Arizona" closes at the @mitmedialab this week. Come visit final frames render in our digital garden. 🌵
Mesa, Arizona has become a major hub for data center infrastructure, hosting operations by tech giants. Located at the edge of the Sonoran Desert, this expansion strains the region's already limited water resources, with water used to cool data centers commodified at the expense of local ecology.
This installation calls attention to the environmental cost of this development through evaporatively cooled computers that render flora native to Maricopa County. Inversing the ancient technology of a zeer pot—where a terracotta pot placed inside another creates an evaporatively cooled storage—the (slow) computers made from salvaged parts run hot as they render plant animations on the screens. The heat of the computers draws the water out of the zeer pot, where the water vapor dribbles into the living plants on the ground below. The screens of the real-time Blender interface include endangered dryland and riparian species that rely on dwindling groundwater sources gradually dying, juxtaposed with maps and archival images of Mesa's development. Through zeer pots, living and rendered plants, the installation urges viewers to consider the material impacts of computational infrastructure: running a program might just run Mesa—and its delicate desert ecology—dry.
Over the course of the installation, the grasses (a local proxy for riparian grasses) have gradually died, while the cacti—adapted to survive harsh environments like deserts or the Media Lab—survive. Simon and I will be giving cacti and soil away to MIT students and groups as we deinstall.
Thank you to the Information Plus conference and the @mit_lcau for this opportunity, as well as the staff at the @mitsap who helped support the development of the ceramics. Shout out to our friend @vinzenzaubry who helped make our salvaged electronics dream a reality.
@harvardgsd@mitarchitecture
Surprise! Simon and I got married. Looking forward to celebrating with friends and extended family in the near future. ❤️ @bizarro_slmn
Photography by the wonderful @zoehopperphoto
I've written some things this year! I am often writing or editing, but never posting the writing. Posting the writing for posterity. Please be in touch if you want to read any of the words.
1. "Plants Making Sense: Ozone Gardens and Evidencing Harm" in Building Metabolism, that explores the history of tobacco and ozone bioindication at the USDA and NASA's campuses in Maryland. The book also has other bits I wrote alongside @lydiakallipoliti and @sanjana.zzz . Thank you to Lydia and @aretimark for the long term collaboration on this work that emerged from the Tallinn Architecture Biennale in 2022. 💕
2. "Thistle in a Haystack: In Search of Archival Plant Media in Romania" in @scaffoldjournal , in which I reflect on an installation co-created with @dodanatural for cover me softly @betacity.eu . It includes a public apology to @chrisxxallen who was deeply allergic to the hay in the installation that he raked into shape, as well as reflections on digital plants and medicinal weeds in screens and fields and books. Thanks to the editors at Scaffold for the invite, and so nice to be back (in part, anyway) at my alma mater @uoftdaniels .
3. "Types and Specimens: Plants, Digital Assets, and Ecological World-Building in Spatial Design" in Architecture and Progress edited by Matt Hall and Mark Allen Blumberg. I talk a bit about my digital plant modelling process and how it relates to courses I taught where I worked with and learned from wonderful students at @weitzman_landarch and @nuarchitecture_soan . Thank you to Matt and Mark for the invitation.
canals, stream beds, and trickling rivers in Mesa, Arizona
"run dry" installation fragment with @bizarro_slmn , for Information Plus hosted by @mit_lcau , up at the @mitmedialab
Belated post to share my small contribution to the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale this year. I had the chance to revisit and expand on prior work with "Uncommon Knowledge: Plants as Sensors." The contribution explores the idea that plants might act as sensors or proxies for environmental data, proposing a counter method of community-based environmental data in response to large-scale data infrastructure projects. As a form of low, slow tech, this aimed to encourage reflection and engagement with plant life as evidence of environmental change in opposition to fast, high resolution data. This time, I focused on narrowleaf milkweed's relationship to groundwater and how it responds, slowly and latently, to the draw of water from large-scale data centers on the water table on the Columbia River in Washington and Oregon. This technical drawing aims to show plants as a kind of technology or sensor that are as rich in data as machines, so long as we learn (from horticulturalists, ecologists, and those with strong relations to the land) to read them.
I am expanding on this line of thinking in the near future, so stay tuned! Missing this work and excited to share new things.
Thank you to all the friends who have spotted my panel at the Arsenale and sent me photos, wishing I was there with you! (I am behind Anthony Acciavetti and Andrés Jaque if you are still going before it closes next month). Photo of the panels by Marco Zorzanello.
another old tree: got to walk around Pando, the world's largest tree by weight and mass. As a clonal quaking aspen tree, it has almost 50,000 individual stems but comes from the same root system, and it's estimated to be at least 9000 years old! All of the individual stems are genetically identical which was the giveaway that they're all one organism even though it spreads over 42 hectares.
Learned much about the debates/disses on clonal vs non-clonal in the community of old tree caretakers, too. Thanks to @bizarro_slmn for the pics of me with old trees.
something comforting about meeting trees that have been around for almost five millennia. somewhere in this grove is methuselah, an ancient bristlecone pine tree that is one of the oldest known living non-clonal trees in the world at 4856 years old.
A still from a very widescreen animation made for "Before You Were Here," an exhibition by the @buellcenter describing the history of the development of the Morningside Campus. The animation, created as a collaboration between the Buell Center and @northeasterncamd , is a reconstruction (or rather a fabulation) of the plant community that preceded the development of the site.
The animation features plant species stemming from archival research by the Buell Center's team, and draws on the Welikia Project's amazing historical ecological maps of New York City. Spot a number of plant species, including American Chestnut, Tulip Tree, Red Maple, Red Oak, Serviceberry, Flameleaf Sumac, Pipsissewa, Rabbit Tobacco, American Burnweed, and Panicgrass.
You can visit an AR version of the plants as part of a longer exhibition of "Before You Were Here" at the Butler Library. While you stand in the AR plants, explore the full gamut of the Buell Center's archival research and beautiful drawings that take you through time. Reminds me of a line from a Margaret Atwood poem: "Turn, look down: there is no city; this is the centre of a forest your place is empty."
Thank you to the Buell Center for this collaboration with Northeastern, truly a wonder to collaborate with Elsa @nomoneybuffalo , Lucia, and Michelle! 🌱
