survey
with Gracie Meek
Harvard Graduate School of Design
Penny White Project Fund Award 2023
Multi-Modal Readings of Bandelier National Monument’s Geological and Spatial Relations
Bandelier National Monument preserves the homes and territory of the Ancestral Puebloans who inhabited the Frijoles Canyon fifty miles west of Santa Fe, New Mexico. The site contains a unique assembly of Ancestral Pueblo homes and kivas carved into Bandelier’s porous volcanic tuff cliffs between 1150 and 1600 AD. The team documented and analyzed Bandelier National Monument on-and off-site as a case study of intimate human-landscape interaction. The survey of Bandelier National Monument served two purposes within this theme: 1) investigating the Ancestral Puebloan’s lived experience with the site’s geologic context and 2) contributing new digital recording techniques to existing archaeological and ethnographic surveys of the site. The project negotiated between human-scale inhabitation and the geologic, climatic, and ecological parameters that underpin it. The methods of documentation included LiDAR scanning, digital and analog photography, analytical drawing, and cartography. This multi-modal survey systematically recorded specific fractions of Bandelier National Monument to develop a design rationale for landscape architecture driven by intimate relations with the existing geographic context. The research outcome seeks to delineate ethnographic and geologic relationships that explore the role of site specificity in landscape architecture.
