REALMS is a landscape practice
(design, research, teaching, making).



Tied Across Time
Shifting Lubra
Complexities of Flood Disaster
A Landscape that has Never Existed
Trajectories of Practice Across Time
Agencies of the Present
Landscape is Knowledge
Fuel and the Himalayan Future
Open-ended Landscape
Belonging/Not Belonging
Emerging Hybridity & the New Vernacular
Willow and Water
Ascent
At the Meeting of Earth and Sky
Passage & Discovery
Agency of a Path
Transient Materials
Fagopyrum tataricum

About


Mark

Open-Ended Landscape



2019-current
Saptari, Nepal
collaboration with UNOPS

Across southern Nepal, flood disaster is an annual occurrence. These disasters are manufactured by a diverse cocktail of circumstance: poor governance and destructive infrastructure are only the beginning. Riverside embankments are the by-and-large the only effort made--other than post-disaster response--to address this reality.

This proposal imagines a response to flood disaster that rejects the prevalent notion of flood control in favor of a landscape that is allowed to shift over time, shaped by dynamic waters, sediments, plants, knowledge, and landscape-making practice.

It begins with the insertion of a series of layered, flood-permeable infrastructure intended to attenuate high-speed floodwater and encourage the deposition of sediment in the lower floodplain. This initial stage isn’t an end in itself, but the beginning of a process. As flood stages come and go, the landscape from the previous year shifts. New sediment accumulates, new channels form, plants keep growing or are washed away. Landscape infrastructure is reimagined each year on these foundations. This infrastructure is continually shaped through adaptive maintenance driven by place-based knowledge that evolves along with the land.


Mark