Fall 2017
Landscape Architecture Studio Elective
Acequias
Instructors | Emily Vogler & David Katz
B.E.M.P PLUS: EDCUCATION LANDSCAPES
Acequias is an interdisciplinary studio between Landscape Architecture and Ceramics. The goal of this studio is to reconsider attitudes toward the irrigation ditch system in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The Acequia is an ancient gravity driven flood irrigation system that stretches and weaves through the city. It also is the “material and spiritual embodiment of people making habitable places” (Pena). Embedded with immense cultural knowledge the acequias system also provides riparian corridors spliced into a dense city fabric.
Currently the Acequia is referred to as “ditches” and generally considered as left over spaces in the city. This studio exams these ditch spaces and attempts to offer a different lense in which we can view the ditches as well as provide alternate solutions to stabilize the slopes of irrigation ditches.
The proposal operates and splices onto the exising monitoring management practices of the Bosque Ecological Monitoring Plan (B.E.M.P) of the Middle Rio Grande region. B.E.M.P is a science initiative that engages local citizens and students surrounding the Rio Grande to help generate scientific data in order to monitor the ecological health of the river.
The project speculates how the care and curiosity of monitoring the river’s flood plain could expand to encompass a portion of the current ditches. Rather than proposing a solution this project is understood as a foundation or as one way to spark interest in the school’s neighbouring ditches.
Devon G. Peña, “Acequia: Place based-identities”
Exhibition at the Bayard Ewing Building (BEB) Gallery
