Fabricating Feral

Fabricating Feral interrogates regional ecologies of material extraction and use and considers redirecting these energy flows toward the creation of a new aesthetic in the practice of landscape architecture.

The work embeds entropy into small-scale fabrications to suggest alternative concrete constructions that interrupt common waste cycles, minimize carbon outputs, and embrace landscape processes of growth and change. This project asks two separate but related questions:

• Can the medium of landscape help us also re-imagine and revalue the scale of processes that create the ubiquitous materials of our built environment?
• Can process-based materials be created and deployed outside of the industrial capitalist systems that often distribute resources and impacts unequally?

The resulting mock-ups are the start of prototypes for replacing traditional concrete systems that think big and act at human, community, and infrastructural scales to promote living landscapes in our built environments.

Thomas Hogge is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at Auburn’s School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture.