Robert Gerard Pietrusko on landscape design, spatial modeling, and conspiracy theories | Penn Today

This semester, Robert Gerard Pietrusko joined the standing faculty of the Department of Landscape Architecture as an associate professor, following a decade on the landscape architecture faculty at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. His design work, which is produced under the name of his studio, WARNING OFFICE, has been exhibited in more than 15 countries, and he is a fellow at the American Academy in Rome in 2021.

This semester he is teaching a landscape architecture studio called Conspiracy as Method, which looks at a number of natural disasters that have been attributed to climate change, like the Day Zero water crisis in Cape Town, South Africa in 2018.

“I’ve been engaged in a larger research project over the last two or three years about conspiracy theories as a type of world building,” Pietrusko says. “When arguing that there are hidden actors managing the planet, they are imagining complex and sometimes very clever connections.”

He explains his understanding of conspiracy theorists as a kind of collective cosmology. “When conspiracy theorists imagine, with cynicism, that there are all these major institutions and actors that collectively manage the world, well, that’s actually a rather optimistic view of what society is capable of. Do we as designers have this same optimism? Hoping that we might, I took all of these pieces as prompts to ask: Can we explore the relationship between design thinking and conspiratorial reasoning to, in a positive way, imagine how the world could be governed in the face of climate change?”

Peitrusko is also part of the newly-formed Environmental Modeling Lab (EMLab) at The Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology.

“The work that we’ve talk about so far have been about the relationship between media, data, and storytelling. But part of that is also the use of modeling. … The relationship between models and what they correspond to is highly uncertain. In that gap, there are an infinite number of stories we can tell about the meaning of data and how they helps us think about the future. I’m really excited about that potential.”

In Plain Sight (2018) was included in Designs for Different Futures at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. “It has always struck me that it is impossible to think about global citizenship outside of the representations of the globe, so the piece begins by looking at different representations of the globe and how these connect to narratives of citizenship,” he says. “It begins with the Blue Marble and how that supports narratives of Spaceship Earth and global stewardship. This is then compared with NASA’s nighttime lights imagery which seems to support neoliberal narratives of borderless, frictionless, free-flowing intercourse all over the world. The piece tried to challenge that narrative.”

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