| Performative Landscapes examines and strategizes the production of artificial wetlands, port facilities, and recreational/commercial fishing areas by utilizing the excess dredge material generated by the Houston Ship Channel. Performative Landscapes seeks to propose a developmental tool kit and set of logics that will guide the growth of new wetlands and foster the production of integrated, not fragmented, program along Galveston Bay. The primary goal of the project then is to produce a design method, a generative seed, that can be used in the genesis of new and integrated man-made and natural systems along the coast, and in Galveston Bay. What I primarily advance in this thesis is a design analytic and a design method geared towards ecological and relational thinking. These two tools are derived and inspired by the concept of self-organization in material systems and the operational searching method of the genetic algorithm as defined by David E. Goldberg. |
