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🌍🍽️ Diàlegs | El paisatge que mengem
Com influeixen el territori i el clima en la manera com mengem?
L’ETSAB acull un nou Diàleg entre arquitectura i gastronomia amb Tat Bonvehí (arquitecta) i Ada Parellada (cuinera).
📅 Dimarts 10 de març
📍 Sala de Graus · ETSAB
Moderació a càrrec de les estudiants Mireia Fuster i Carmen Sanz.
#ETSAB #CulturaETSAB #UPCArts #Arquitectura #Paisatge @upc_arts
Three Landscape Essays: Mobile Ecosystems for Future Climates
by Lluís Alexandre Casanovas Blanco and Lys Villalba
With Landscape Architects Thinking Through Soil (Tat Bonvehí, Seth Denizen)
Images: José Hevia
Three Landscape Essays is a pilot project that imagines how Southern-European public space might transform in the near future. Different phenomena–including recent heat waves and prolonged droughts, alongside the normalization of extreme weather phenomena such as snowfall or torrential rains–, highlight the lack of preparedness of southern European cities for the evolving climate crisis. These new conditions compel us to rethink our public space. In urban areas, a widespread lack of shade and an increase in temperatures due to impermeable surfaces and a scarcity of plant species softening the effects of heat, urge us to resort to new imaginaries. Far from a limitation, this crisis offers the opportunity to reconsider public space as a meeting place for diversity, a site of comfort for individuals from the same or different species, a node of convergence for different worldviews beyond the human.
Yet, the challenge is: How do we increase vegetation in the city in the face of the growing prospect of water scarcity? How can we imagine a public space for gathering without consuming a large volume of resources, a space pleasant for various stakeholders, a space fostering new ideas of community beyond the human species? Responding to some of Madrid’s recent remodeling of public spaces –which overlook the urgency of the new climate situation and its opportunities–, Three Landscape Essays constitutes a pioneering experience imagining how our squares and streets could be.
Credits:
Authors: Lluís Alexandre Casanovas Blanco and Lys Villalba
With landscape architects Thinking Through Soil
Instagrams: @lluis.alexandre.casanovas , @lysvillalba , @thinkingthroughsoil
Production: Viuda de Ramírez
Design team collaborator: Irene Domínguez
Landscaping: Thinking Through Soil (Tat Bonvehí, Seth Denizen) @thinkingthroughsoil
Collaborators: Jaime de la Torre, Paco Téllez Buitrago, Jingyuan Zhu
NEW CALL FOR PAPERS!
Clara and guest editors Seth Denizen, Jolein Bergers, Nadia Casabella, and Ananda Kohlbrenner are launching a call for papers for the thematic section “Architecture has a soil problem” of issue 13, to be published in 2027.
Architecture has a soil problem. Not only epistemologically—through the discipline’s limited frameworks to understand, analyze, or work with soil—but also ontologically, in the very way it conceives of soil in the first place. From the digging of foundations to the sealing of surfaces, architectural practice typically treats soil as ‘dirt’, an interchangeable substance devoid of specificity, meaning, or vitality. Soils are too often reduced to a passive background for human activity, an empty canvas to build upon rather than a living milieu to design with, within or through. This ignorance indirectly contributes to their depletion and demise. What would it mean to resist this thanatological path and instead reconceptualize both soil and architecture through their entanglements, in relation to the pedogenetic processes they co-produce?
Architecture has a soil problem or rather, several interrelated problems or predicaments that must be addressed. In this call for contributions, we invite submissions that may (A) deepen our understanding of these problems through scholarly or visual interventions, or (B) present case studies of built projects that suggest ways of confronting or transforming them.
Contributions may take the form of academic papers or visual essays, and can be written in English or French. Abstracts should be submitted by 30/01/2026 to clara.archi [at] ulb.be. Full CFP and exact modalities can be found on our website : https://clararevue.ulb.be
¿Qué haces el jueves? Ven a Laguna CDMX para la presentación de nuestro libro “Pensando en el Suelo: Agricultura de Aguas Residuales en el Valle del Mezquital” este jueves a las 19:00 @lagunamx Con bebidas, buena gente y buena tierra!
Thinking Through Soil began with this story that the famous soil scientist Hans Jenny tells about the Mendocino pygmy forest. In his telling, whenever botanists would bring students to the forest they would explain that the small stature of the trees was the result of the extremely acidic soil, but when soil scientists would bring students to the forest they would explain that the extremely acidic soil was the result of the ericaceous leaves dropped by the plants, which had acidified the soil. For Jenny, this was a cautionary tale about the danger of narrating the history of environmental systems through linear causal sequences... a point that I think any historian would appreciate. In our book, we also take this warning to heart as we try to narrate the co-production of a city with its soil, and find surprises like the one shown here, that in the Mezquital Valley hybrid corn used for high fructose corn syrup is irrigated with diabetes medication.
#thinkingthroughsoil
#soilscience
#mezquitalvalley #wastewater
#urbansoil
#mexicocity
Mapping soil is a difficult task. Unlike topography, the most important features of a soil are not visible from its surface. To know anything at all, you have to see it in section, as a profile cut down into the thickness of the soil body. This is not the view that maps present us with, and to solve this problem, soil scientists divide the soil up into "pedons," which are hexagonal chunks of ground between 1 and 10 square meters at the surface, and extending down to the bottom of the soil. Soil maps show us where these hexagonal chunks are the same and where they are different. This soil pedon represents a soil formed in the wastewater of the Mezquital Valley, where microplastics, pharmaceuticals, and heavy metals mix with the nutrient rich sewage of 22 million people. For more info on this project check out the book at T̾h̾i̾n̾k̾i̾n̾g̾ ̾T̾h̾r̾o̾u̾g̾h̾ ̾S̾o̾i̾l̾:̾ ̾w̾a̾s̾t̾e̾w̾a̾t̾e̾r̾ ̾a̾g̾r̾i̾c̾u̾l̾t̾u̾r̾e̾ ̾i̾n̾ ̾t̾h̾e̾ ̾M̾e̾z̾q̾u̾i̾t̾a̾l̾ ̾V̾a̾l̾l̾e̾y̾, from Harvard Press. 𝐋𝐢𝐧𝐤 𝐢𝐧 𝐁𝐢𝐨 @tbr0603
#thinkingthroughsoil
#soilscience
#mezquitalvalley #wastewater
@harvardgsd@harvardpress
It’s great to hear that ｂｏｏｋｓ ａｒｅ ｓｈｉｐｐｉｎｇ. Thanks for all the photos!
For those of you who want to avoid funding more trips to space for Bezos, the book is also available on Bookshop Dot Org. Link in bio!
Wednesday Talk 02
Seth Denizen @sethdenizen
Montserrat Bonvehi Rosich @tbr0603
Thinking Through Soil @thinkingthroughsoil
Topic: Thinking Through Soil
Time: June 11, 2025 07:00 PM Istanbul Join Zoom Meeting https://us02web.zoom.us/j/5185914769
It is a Public Talk, anyone who is interested in topic can join us!
/
“To think through soil is to engage with some of the most critical issues of our time. In addition to its agricultural role in feeding eight billion people, soil has become the primary agent of carbon storage in global climate models, and it is crucial for biodiversity, flood control, and freshwater resources. Perhaps no other material is asked to do so much for the human environment, and yet our basic conceptual model of what soil is and how it works remains surprisingly vague.
In cities, soil occupies a blurry category whose boundaries are both empirically uncertain and politically contested. Soil functions as a nexus for environmental processes through which the planet’s most fundamental material transformations occur, but conjuring what it actually is serves as a useful exercise in reframing environmental thought, design thinking, and city and regional planning toward a healthier, more ethical, and more sustainable future.
Through a sustained analysis of the world’s largest wastewater agricultural system, located in the Mexico City–Mezquital hydrological region, Thinking Through Soil imagines what a better environmental future might look like in central Mexico. More broadly, this case study offers a new image of soil that captures its shifting identity, explains its profound importance to rural and urban life, and argues for its capacity to save our planet.”
/
Dirty Drawings No #4
the beginnings of a conversation, undisciplinary drawings
No#4 will be a kinetic field of actions re/de-situationing at both a deep microscopic dive with a close look and a telescopic admiration with a distance look, rubbing up aganist each other, flashing for an obstinate query.
• the hope instead of the death •
#dirty #dirtydrawing #drawingconstellations
Was great to talk to ʟᴀɴᴅᴢɪɴᴇ about our new book, T͎h͎i͎n͎k͎i͎n͎g͎ ͎T͎h͎r͎o͎u͎g͎h͎ ͎S͎o͎i͎l͎ (link in bio).
Thanks so much to Urška Škerl for setting this up. As @landezine_com writes:
This case study from the Mezquital Valley, in Mexico, represents a possible wastewater urbanism scenario that researchers grasp through soil. By singling out a series of “characters,” from a cow to metformin, who each tell a story of the soil’s horizon, they compose a wider picture of contributing relations to the soil formation, 𝘣𝘰𝘵𝘵𝘰𝘮 𝘶𝘱. By identifying participants, their contingencies and processes, the designers propose future scenarios for a new soil horizon, taking into account complex socio-economic, political, agricultural, ecological, and health issues. The research cross-sects geographical and urban analysis, toxicology studies, cultural studies, diet, ethnocide, technological investments, botanical research, water quality, sewer, drainage, … that are inherently embedded in the soil’s identity. By this, as the authors write, understanding the soil as “inseparable from its unrealized possibilities and potential future”, the emerging soil is “inherently capable of change”.
@tbr0603@somfoundation@landezine_com@harvardgsd@gsd_mla@urban_soils
•´¯`•. 𝙇𝙞𝙫𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙢 𝙡𝙞𝙣𝙠 https://www.gsd.harvard.edu/event/book-release-thinking-through-soil/
Thursday, April 24, at 12:30PM ET Montserrat Bonvehi Rosich, Gary Hilderbrand and I will be at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design @harvardgsd@gsd_mla for the book launch!
Thanks to Harvard Design Press for organizing! Thanks also to the SOM Foundation Research Prize for supporting the project. @somfoundation
Limited copies of the book will be available for sale at the event. You can also pre-order it through Harvard University Press ahead of the book’s official release on June 10.
Book Description:
In cities, soil comprises a blurry category whose boundaries are both empirically uncertain and politically contested. By considering the specific material and political conditions of the world’s largest wastewater agriculture system, Thinking Through Soil: Wastewater Agriculture in the Mezquital Valley offers a design methodology derived through a sustained engagement with Mexico’s most controversial soil, and imagines what a better environmental future might look like in central Mexico. This case study demonstrates a way to “think through soil” in urban areas -to privilege soil as the basis for decision-making in city planning and design- and asserts an approach to soil knowledge with global utility, particularly for places where environmental problems are complex, long-term, and have no purely technical solution.
![NEW CALL FOR PAPERS!Clara and guest editors Seth Denizen, Jolein Bergers, Nadia Casabella, and Ananda Kohlbrenner are launching a call for papers for the thematic section “Architecture has a soil problem” of issue 13, to be published in 2027.Architecture has a soil problem. Not only epistemologically—through the discipline’s limited frameworks to understand, analyze, or work with soil—but also ontologically, in the very way it conceives of soil in the first place. From the digging of foundations to the sealing of surfaces, architectural practice typically treats soil as ‘dirt’, an interchangeable substance devoid of specificity, meaning, or vitality. Soils are too often reduced to a passive background for human activity, an empty canvas to build upon rather than a living milieu to design with, within or through. This ignorance indirectly contributes to their depletion and demise. What would it mean to resist this thanatological path and instead reconceptualize both soil and architecture through their entanglements, in relation to the pedogenetic processes they co-produce?Architecture has a soil problem or rather, several interrelated problems or predicaments that must be addressed. In this call for contributions, we invite submissions that may (A) deepen our understanding of these problems through scholarly or visual interventions, or (B) present case studies of built projects that suggest ways of confronting or transforming them.Contributions may take the form of academic papers or visual essays, and can be written in English or French. Abstracts should be submitted by 30/01/2026 to clara.archi [at] ulb.be. Full CFP and exact modalities can be found on our website : https://clararevue.ulb.be](https://sp1.picnob.com/p/pt_6758145132473463395533_0_101eb501e357e405a1d98e1757b4cd8c.jpg?o=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&h=17be7059b2da2c2bf51017020c48ac74)
