DANIELLE N. CHOI

Danielle N. Choi is a landscape architect, writer, and educator. Her research explores landscape design as a cultural practice that brings technology, infrastructure, and ecology into dialogue with public life. She currently teaches at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Prior to her academic appointment, Choi practiced in landscape studios in New York City and Berlin.

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Where Were We?

Journal of Architectural Education

2020

Category: Publications



Bathe in it, fling it into the air, carpet the desert in Bermuda and Buffalo and Kentucky Blue....The flood came upon them like an animal, like a vengeful live thing, earth-colored and savagely fast. “It’s water, Ray. Is it water?”
                          
- Claire Vaye Watkins, Gold Fame Citrus


This essay examines the twentieth-century water infrastructure of Phoenix, Arizona, an infrastructure transformed the desert into farmland, then farmland into suburban sprawl. However, these systems can also be studied as a vital force whose arrival so contradicted pre-existing geology and ecology that it triggered unexpected effects where terrestrial definitions of region have been ruptured.


Site Credit: August Sklar