Project Statement

Ground Up is the student-run journal of the Department of Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning at University of California, Berkeley. Published annually, each issue centers on a theme of contemporary relevance with interdisciplinary possibilities. Articles and artworks are gathered through an open call for submissions, so naturally the journal is guided by the interests of our readers and collaborators—from students to professionals, academics to practitioners, artists to scientists.

Since 2011, Ground Up has served as a forum for the publication of design scholarship. This year's theme is Home, a topic that has been on the minds of the world, our country, and the students at the UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design. In this issue, definitions of Home traverse scales— from the 3,000-mile-long US-Mexico border to a Japanese-American Internment Camp to the body.

Project Narrative

In 1972, the "Blue Marble" made it home. The first full-color image of the Earth taken from space landed on coffee tables and TV screens around the world—imprinting itself on humanity and permanently expanding our idea of home. Nearly half a century later, ideas and images of home are as intimate as they are infinite. Home is a house. A body. A single point on a map. As "Blue Marble" suggests, home both contains and transcends place. It is ecological, ideological, political, cultural, and, at times, even fictional.

Home is deeply personal. It is a thought, a vision, a memory. It is as satisfying as the turn of a key, as comfortable as a familiar song, and as simple as a packed lunch. And yet today, home also carries more weight. As nations calcify their borders; as urban centers sprawl into megalopolises; as species go extinct; as rising housing prices predominantly displace people of color, we are forced to ask: who has the right to home? What has the right to home? On what grounds? And at what costs?

Issue 08: HOME

The projects and essays in Issue 08 expand upon and complicate the word "home" — from the house to the territory, from the gut to the cosmos, through time, across scales, transcending place and space. Home resists fixed definitions.

Given current events, the theme of Home felt timely, both for this journal specifically and for the world more broadly. We anticipated receiving outwardly-focused commentary. Instead, we were flooded with submissions offering deeply personal perspectives on global topics.These articles and images perform a balancing act by introducing a level of intimacy to the political and to the built environment—a quiet counterpoint to our anxious reality. If Home is the lens through which we imagine the world—as individuals, as nations, as a global community—then conceptions of home have agency in shaping new worlds.

We are in a transitional moment for our collective Home as natural disasters, droughts, wildfires, and sea level rise upend entire communities. At moments, the weight of this change presses urgently upon us. California's devastating wildfires of recent years displaced thousands. This de-homing was temporary for many evacuees but devastatingly permanent for others. Meanwhile, hundreds of miles away from the flames, the windows of Wurster Hall, the Home of the College of Environmental Design, were shuttered against thick curtains of smoke—particulate matter composed of ephemera from other homes, a humbling reminder of the fragility of our own.

Traditional definitions ignore this very fragility and still conceive of Home as a house: static, private, and immutable. But simplistic interpretations—while seductive—fail to acknowledge a disparity of experience in a world constantly in flux. As landscape architects, it's time to audit our given definition, and reconceive of Home to include evolving social, political, and climatic paradigms. It's time for quiet observation. It's time for radical design.

Issue 08 is our start.

Our Impact

Created in response to the Occupy Wall Street and 99% movements, Ground Up serves as a student platform to discuss contemporary topics free from the whims of intellectual fashion. Each article in Issue 08 expresses a unique, nuanced perspective on Home. Together, their diverse voices and mediums create a colorful, lively collection, while simultaneously prompting a moment of critical self reflection—for our profession and the world.

Our Approach

The articles featured in Issue 08 also reflect the concerns and interests of our student team—from planning to architecture, politics to landscape, archives to art. Content was selected, coordinated, edited, and curated by a group of 20 graduate students of landscape architecture and environmental planning. Students worked with authors with shared interests, developing a graphic vision and textual clarity for each piece, and integrating it into the voice of the journal as a whole.

Issue 08 reflects a deeper level of engagement with the larger design community at UC Berkeley. Editors established a new collaboration with the Environmental Design Archives to bring the history of the school into the journal. Archival images run throughout the journal, including our cover image. Additionally, we authored "The Wurster Dispatch," an article that highlights visiting professors and practitioners as a part of the landscape department's annual lecture series. Issue 08 also showcases work from Berkeley professors, PhD, graduate, and undergraduate students throughout the College of Environmental Design.

Our graphics team dedicated ample pages to image-based submissions and used custom visual elements to move readers through longer, narrative-driven pieces. Throughout the journal, a playful color palette adds levity and brightness to the overall design.

Our Reach

Each fall, Ground Up announces the issue's theme in an open call for submissions. We select content that speaks to both the theme and landscape architecture in unique ways. This year, we made a strategic effort to include students from a wide variety of institutions and countries. With our extended, global reach, we were able to be highly selective of the journal's content. We included work addressing design in Singapore, Israel, Norway, the UK, and at the US-Mexico border. We also included student and recent graduate work from Royal College of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Harvard Graduate School of Design, and Cambridge University.

This year, Ground Up used our digital platforms, including Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, as an outlet to share idea-generation for the theme, our editorial process, and curated content for the journal. Our website, groundupjournal.org, continues to serve as a platform to sell journals and post digital content. The journal is available at Bay Area bookstores, including William Stout and Pegasus Books, and museums, including Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. In our ongoing effort to engage students with the journal, we are expanding to more university libraries beyond our own, including the Rhode Island School of Design.

Our Vision

Each year, Ground Up strengthens Berkeley's legacy of empowering students to engage each other and the profession with topics that speak to the concerns of our generation. Through the originality of its theme, the caliber of its content, and the rigor of its execution, Issue 08: HOME is truly unique for the series. We are proud to continue the voice of this journal and expand the possibilities for future issues.