2023 Thesis Prize Recipient
UCLA School of Architecture and Urban Design
Presented June 12-19, 2023

The Owens Lake Studio is a design collaboration by Gabe Saltzman and Chris Rancourt documenting the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s airborne dust mitigation project at Owens Lake, California.

The ten stories we present here are mixtures of facts and parafictions calibrated to convey the most salient realities discovered in our many months of research. Embracing design’s duty to synthesize and provoke, we found, created, and composed a selection of artifacts whose myriad combinations and connotations attempt to inspire multiple worthwhile understandings and questions. Not just the truth (from our view), but also fictions constructed to illuminate deeper context including the truth’s most likely competitors.

To us, architecture is a simultaneously technical, aesthetic, and social practice that is bound both by physical rules and a requirement to look beyond what currently exists. As such, we believe that a fuller perspective comes from digesting the range of outcomes between what is happening and what could be happening.

In this sense, the product of our studio is simultaneously an analysis and a prompt. Not merely a researched history of the past, nor a speculative future, but perhaps a research-based speculative now.

Wrestle with the earth forever Botanists, satellites, and politicians Dig, dry, destroy A butterfly effect Uncanny playspace Turbine testing and wind on demand Fluid dynamic domestication So, is it beautiful? Monitoring, monitoring, monitoring... Moving the [atmospheric] river

Exhibition Curatorial Conversation Gallery About

Wrestle with the earth forever
Botanists, satellites, and politicians
Dig, dry, destroy
A butterfly effect
Uncanny playspace
Turbine testing and wind on demand
Fluid dynamic domestication
So, is it beautiful?
Monitoring, monitoring, monitoring...
Moving the [atmospheric] river

Exhibition
Curatorial Conversation
Gallery
About