Nancy Mei, Brooke Hair-02

Studio

A201 Dense Ecologies / City and Bay

Advisors

Mark Anderson / Nicholas de Monchaux / Mark Smout / Laci Videmsky

Introduction

From the effects of hydraulic mining in the 19th century, through the combined

effects of bay fi ll in the 20th, to the de-industrialized (and often demilitarized)

brownfi elds of the early 21st, the San Francisco Bay is an exemplary crucible of

the often-fraught relationship between cities and the larger ecology that support

them. As the margin’s of today’s bay begin to be returned to a “natural” state

through extensive man-made remediation, we seek to question whether the

bay can also be a new vessel for a new kind of relationship between cities and

ecologies, one that emphasizes the reciprocal nature of the relationship between

urban civilization and natural wild, and avoids oversimplifi cation and imagemaking

in favor of the real complexities of cities and landscapes developing

together. As noted by William Cronon, a skeptical attitude about ‘Nature’ is not

at all a rejection of the ideals of sustainability and ecological survival; rather, it

might be vital to them.

Through parallel investigations of multiple sites at the periphery of bay and

city, students from this core studio engaged the latest thinking in urban density,

producing proposals for new forms of hybrid urban fabric, and new building and

landscape typologies to engage their development and use.

Links

https://ced.berkeley.edu/ced/galleries/arch#/2014-graduate-student-work