Practice-Based PhD · Committee: Marcelo Stamm (chair), Paul Kelsch, Mintai Kim, Shaun Rosier
This dissertation develops a theory of adaptive epistemology for landscape architecture operating at territorial scales under conditions of irreducible uncertainty. Drawing on twenty years of practice engaging ecological complexity, embedded sensing, and generational robotics, it proposes that design practice is itself a mode of knowledge production, conducted through iterative, feedback-based, in-situ inquiry rather than predictive control. Three contributions organize the argument: adaptive epistemology names the framework, the cultivant names the disposition, and refraction names the method through which both became legible.
The framework. Design propositions as hypotheses tested in situ. An Orphic project conducted with Promethean tools — attentive to what systems reveal rather than determined to enforce what models predict.
The disposition. Ongoing negotiation between designed intention and biological agency. Maintenance as epistemological act. Plurality as constitutive of the design relationship from the outset.
The method. Systematic retelling of practice from vantage points its instrumental contexts never demanded. Developed through the Practice Research Symposia and continued across the dissertation.
Human, machine, and biological cognition operating simultaneously as irreducibly different modes of knowing.
Sensing as design. The instrument constitutes what can be known, and what can be known determines what can be governed.
Biology coupled with computation as a knowledge-producing medium. Living systems generating responses that exceed what any sensor was calibrated to detect.
Learning loops across timescales exceeding human institutional memory. Knowledge distributed into infrastructure rather than held in the cognition of practitioners.
The territorial condition. Biology, computation, and infrastructure operating as a single entangled system producing a new category of landscape.
The ethical orientation. Provisional, adaptive practice that remains answerable to what landscapes are becoming and to whom the costs and benefits accrue.
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University