"Thinking with Landscapes" Elise Hunchuck

As the domain where different vectors of the current climate crisis meet and interact, and where conflicts around its regulation are emerging, the atmosphere also produces multiple localities where these transformations can be observed and understood—and sites of mediation can be imagined. Far from being understood in all of its complexity, the atmosphere continues to elude our ability to model its dynamics—or to compute future scenarios. 

In Thinking with Landscapes: The Fourth Atmosphere, ongoing research (conducted together with Marco Ferrari and Jingru (Cyan) Cheng at the Royal College of Art, London) examines how established and emerging plans—including large-scale weather modification proposals such as China’s Tian He (Sky River) and Pleistocene Park in Siberia, both seeking to govern water in various forms, is leading to the rise of a new planetary imaginary, extending well-known concepts of land sovereignty into the domain of the atmosphere. 

Elise Misao Hunchuck is a Berlin-based landscape researcher, editor, and educator trained in landscape architecture (MLA, Daniels, 2016), philosophy and geography (University of Toronto). She is a Visiting Lecturer at the Royal College of Art School of Architecture (London), a Senior Researcher and Teaching Fellow in the landscape architecture programme at The Bartlett School of Architecture, an Assistant professor, teaching stream, at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto, a member of the editorial board of Scapegoat: Architecture/Landscape/Political Economy, and editor for transmediale (2021–2022).