It is difficult to value what we cannot see, and few things remain as overlooked as the ground beneath our feet.
Too often designed by default — flattened, compacted, paved, and drained — soil is in fact a living assemblage, home to more species of fungi and bacteria in a single pinch than there are plants and vertebrates in all of North America, and a carbon sink holding more than three times the carbon in the atmosphere. This studio began from the premise that by redesigning our relationship to the ground, we can shift our occupation of the land from extraction and neglect toward amelioration and regeneration, treating the ground not as a passive background but as a process always in the making. The studio grounded itself in the Wallkill River Valley—running north from New Jersey to Kingston through flood-prone muck soils, suburban sprawl, and one of the fastest-growing regions in New York State—as an expanded urban site of buried streams, drained farmlands, and polluted waters.
Shown here is work from the first project in the studio, during which students dug deep into a range of typical ground conditions across the Wallkill River Valley, in southeastern NY, from the compacted urban soils of downtown Goshen, the buried stream of Middletown, the suburban developments in the uplands, to the drained, agricultural muck soils of the Black Dirt Region. Rather than depicting ground as a static object, their work explores how to represent ground as a living, changing entity, using both drawing and animation to explore the assemblages, agents and temporal processes that create and alter ground.
