scapeshift: 100113 - sand dune morphology

There are several general categories of sand dune morphology including linear, dome, star, and crescent-shape. Read more about the types here.

Using Google Earth to scan the globe, it is relatively easy to find examples of different dune types (if you don't have it, download here, free version is fine). Make your own survey of the world's dunescapes. Select two you would like to analyze, and save an image similar to those below. Save the image in 4-6 sections and tile them together to get a high resolution image suitable for printing.

badain jaran desert, china

dun huang, china

great sand dunes, colorado

white sands, new mexico

Studio Description...............

This studio focused on complexities in the relationship between site and intervention. Working within the pedagogical framework of the second semester design studio, these complexities were explored through a series of abstract exercises. Abstract work revealed to the students that a site is not a fixed condition, it is a flux of material and immaterial processes; and that a site is not a received condition, it is constructed (consciously or unconsciously) through the act of conceiving an intervention.

At the outset, students produced analytical mappings of sand dune fields – dunescapes. In tracking specific types of data (dune height, ridgeline length, angle between ridgelines, etc.) across a dunescape, maps investigated how the material behaviors of sand grains, interacting with the wind and each other, give rise to form, one that is undergoing continual transformation. A further comparative analysis of data in the maps uncovered hidden organizational patterns in the dunescapes. Findings from the maps informed the development of a material derived from wood molding profiles. The behaviors of this material were developed uniquely by each student in response to embedded curvilinear geometries, and then drawn into the process of assembling a landscape – a site on which to conceive an intervention.

The intervention on this site came in the form of an observatory. An observatory was defined generally as a device for gathering data concerning a specific type of process or event – data may be gathered for empirical purposes (radio telescope), or for more experiential purposes (Turrell’s Roden Crater). In this case, the observatory was designed to produce qualitatively different spatial experiences by tracking and filtering sunlight over the course of time.

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100113 - sand dune morphology

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