Office of Outdoor Research, 
Landscape Morphologies Lab

Owens Lake Visual Studies


Designing the new Owens Lake dust controls requires a marriage of the incommensurable. The objective prisms of engineering and ecology must answer to the seeming frivolity of our subjective aesthetics, as represented by landscape architecture. This is not an unprecedented collaboration, but the compositional scale and consequence of Owens Lake challenge the ways in which engineering and landscape architecture generally join forces. A suitably facile integration requires a difficult hybrid situational awareness: where on the vast lake (and its many futures) are the best intersections of subjective and objective interests? How do the architectures of aesthetic experience align with the lake’s operational concerns and economies?

Hybrid transect samples: 

See The Spoils of Dust for more.

Initial visual studies samples:

Initial White Papers:


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