A landform-based approach to noogenesis

Abstract

Insights into the creation of radical new assemblages of humans, technologies, ecosystems, and landforms, together forming symbiotic polities is more than an ideal; in the Anthropocene, this is a precondition of survival. This practicum seeks to apply landscape architecture to the phenomenon problem of Noogenesis, “the growth, outside and above the biosphere of an added planetary layer, an envelope of thinking substance” which is the Noosphere.

The goal of this practicum is to investigate the particular natures of built forms and modes of dwelling required in a landscape which serves as active amplifier and instrument for noogenesis. As described by the theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and expanded on by the work of architect Paolo Soleri, this process bears similarities to the ecologically-focused object-oriented ontology of Timothy Morton; the role that this connection can play in informing the design of such a system, at the scale of and in relation to, discrete landforms, will be critically explored.

The role of human consciousness in such a system – described by Teilhhard de Chardin as an “ever-tightening compression requiring ever more Reflection” which Soleri identifies as arising through the transfiguration of awareness and matter through an art of “engrossment” of the “bio-mental” – is that which Morton has identified as ecological, arising from the awareness of nonhuman agents as coequals in existing. It bears marked similarity to the understanding and honouring of nonhumans in Indigenous cultures. Enunciating a series of techniques and methods for creating a responsive land art that rises to these descriptions speaks to the potential of landscape to become a living partner in the expansion of a non-anthropocentric polity of mutually dependent agents.

In focusing on pre-contact forms of land modification as documented by Doolittle, and in exploring the role that recent advances in AI offer for designers, this practicum aims to provide an actionable framework for what has, thus far, remained an essentially theoretical question.