Carolina English

Botanic Realism

My I-10 deck park proposal, Botanic Realism, uses Magical Realism to juxtapose the deck park’s hard and soft infrastructural intersections. Through my analysis, I found that hard infrastructure (roads, trains, etc) visually and physically cut El Paso, creating static embankments. This contrasted with the soft infrastructure (Rio Grande) that also fractured the land but created more fluid segments. When this soft infrastructure is used as a hard boundary (US-Mexico border), ambiguous territories are created and pushed into placelessness (the Chamizal; the deck park itself). Magical Realism is the ideal intervention to pull placelessness back into reality by making a hyper focused place.

Magical Realism‘s core quality is the mundane representation of magical occurrences, making them grounded in reality. Magical Realism creates an uncanny sensory experience that makes you hyper aware of your surroundings. The Sacro Basco, Manhattanhenge, and El Paso’s own Bhutanese architecture are examples of this experience. Using this tradition, I connected the deck park/botanic garden into the urban fabric by creating a hyper awareness of space through the magnification of uncanny sensory experiences. To organize these experiences, I am using a grid (hard infra.) as the site’s “x" axis and the historic changes of the Rio Grande (soft infra.) as the site’s "y” axis. Where they intersect is where the Magical Realist interventions occur.

Role
Design Excellence Nominee
For
University of Texas
Date
Spring 2022
Botanic Realism
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