Publication Date

5-2015

Committee Members

Michael Davidsohn, Chair - Carey Clouse, Member

Abstract

Global Climate is projected to change significantly over the next decade. Given the potential impact of these changes, human relationships with the landscape will change. We as a people will have to re-evaluate our behaviors, activities and aesthetics; and our communities might have to re-assess and re-classify their current land use designations; as is the case potentially for Wachusett Mountain Ski Area in Princeton, Massachusetts. Under the projected climatic changes, the future snow making and sustaining ability of this mountain is of question and at potential risk; and these questions therefore beg the discussion of what to do instead with similar sites, and on a broad scale, of how to best respond to the changes. Landscape design and architecture will be at the forefront of responding to this new environment, and a subsequent holistic integration of these two fields presents an effective way forward. Landscape designs will have to do more than appeal visually, and they will be judged by their capacity to support and sustain a strong level of species biodiversity and food habitat. Supporting these needs are regenerative landscapes which work with nature rather than in contradiction to, and as a result, seek to help ensure our lasting survival. Earth sheltered housing communities offer the most holistic integration of human shelter needs and landscape ecology. The union of a regenerative community with earth sheltered housing represents the best effort of sustainability that we humans have so far built; and at this point it has not been notably achieved. The proposed designs of Shelter Scape 7 embody that union. On sixty acres of Wachusett Mountain, Shelter Scape 7 captures resources; collects the community; cultivates food security; and contributes sustainable habitat for all species. Shelter Scape 7 shelters us, and it shelters nature from us, for our generation but also for seven generations in the future.

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