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created in partnership with Cheryl Luo

Professors: Eva Perez de Vega, Gonzalo Carbajo, Carrie Eastman

Our project is located across the Aral basin in Central Asia, the site of the world’s youngest desert. Once the fourth largest lake in the world, the desiccation of the Aral Sea began with rivers being diverted through major irrigation canals. This has caused dramatic salinization and loss of biodiversity. As the geography of this entire region changes so intensely within lifetimes, connection to the land has been lost.

The yurt is an architectural form that responds to the boundless space of the Central Asian Steppe and embodies nomadic culture. The process of building a yurt is derived from the land and its local ecological systems.

Non-human objects hold memory in a tangible manner. Memory is not an archive, it is an active process. As the sea becomes sand, the residual salt holds the memory of the sea.

By introducing an architectural manifestation—the yurt-making process—we aim to create a new collective memory between humans and more than humans. Our intervention encourages an active, living memory through materials and living matter that compose a yurt. It disrupts the notion that there is one (human) scale and gives equal significance to all parts of the ecological system.

Our project has manifested into interventions across four different sites in the Aral Sea Basin. Each site was chosen due to its connection to the water of the Aral Sea. Three of the sites are located along an irrigation canal that draws water from the rivers that would feed into the sea. The fourth site is located along the former shoreline of the sea.

While each site is located in a different country with different cultural and ecological conditions, they are sited within a cold, semi-arid climate zone and face impacts from the desiccation of the Aral Sea including desertification, loss of biodiversity, toxic dust storms, and loss of local economies.

Each intervention responds to these challenges with an agroforestry line of poplar trees that acts as a windbreak against the dust storms. The poplar trees retain moisture content in the soil, prevent erosion, and provide habitats for non-humans such as the golden eagle, the national bird of Kazakhstan. Along the agroforestry line is a gathering space: a cycle divided into slices by large fabric sails. The program of each cycle differs by site, but the purpose of the sails is to create an experience in which the user is isolated visually along a type of material body and a crafting device. The center of all four cycles become a large gathering and performance space for all material bodies to intersect.

The experience of each slice allows for an engagement with the material body that goes beyond corporeality. The yurt crafting devices include shaping, steaming, craving, and carding structures. We have encouraged non-human engagement by playing with scales. Crafting devices are scaled either up or down, encouraging a new way of interaction. We are breaking the notion that there is only one scale, the human scale.

Our intervention seeks to bridge the disconnect between raw materials and finished product use by bringing consciousness to the ecological interactions that are embedded within materials.

We are proposing an experience that intentionally brings awareness to the ecology of the system, allowing for a holistic view of the world.