Lodgers Pavilion at MIT

The exhibition showcases the two-year-long research conducted in the Pyramid Lake region in Nevada, United States, including the site of study Fly Ranch, and highlights the question of how we “cope” with friction between “neighbors.” The Wilderness and Land Reclamation Acts and indigenous land stewardship represent two ways of approaching the land. The two perspectives are situated at two different moments along a spectrum of knowledge production on the land. The former approaches the land from a top-down perspective that foregrounds the land’s static, immediate utility, while the latter is derived from Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) of the land, which does not differentiate between people, species, and the land.

This exhibition invites TEK into our institutional approach to architecture and acts as an invitation to voyage into a different worldview, a native mode of knowledge production previously shunned by architecture higher education. This exhibition offers an unsolicited but much-needed “wrinkle” in the institute’s false state of equilibrium and attempts to integrate knowledge forms.