LAB-YRINTH
social and ecological principles influence a research institution on sapelo island

Georgia Tech Freshman Studio Professor Fred Pearsall




Spring 2016


By systemic process thinking through the Social-Ecological Systems Framework of understanding Sapelo Island as a landscape of independent spatio-/temporal-/eco-/socio-systems of multiple scales, we enter the site with an eco-centric bias in order to read the site's interaction and dynamic properties relative to the past, present, and 'likely future' contexts. Our mappings analyze the past, present and future homeorhetic pulsation between negative and positive feedback, and delicately sits in a moderately positive state.




























Land Use, Social and Economic Timeline of Sapelo Island Through analyzing the socio-economic aspects of Sapelo through the entire duration of human inhabitance on the island, information about the positive and negative feedback from the socio-economic relationship with the ecological environment helps understand the current socio-ecological state of the island and the projection into the future. In the past, the economy involved the detriment to the environment with the exploitation of the land, but as time progressed the use of the environment has increased but not through conservation and research. As the ecological conditions improve, the social conditions worsen. Projecting into the future with the current trajectory, the social conditions will worsen, and the ecological preservation will continue.





Design Solution LAByrinth is a distributed flow-field scheme for UGAMI's new reserach/education facilities; an artificial ground plane/wood deck system for an interlocking, solid-void 'Peano curve' pattern for a labyrinthine network of paths and shipping container enclosures of variable configuration, scales, and densities, cropped as figure and ground in response to local conditions, connecting arrival with the existing research complex and tidal/marsh levee system. It understands Sapelo Island's social-ecological systems and clues to longer-term survival through ideas of homeorhesis-"dyanmical systems returning to a trajectory"-mining them and their diverse inhabitants for their creative practical, experimental affective and cognitive capacity for adaptation through:

1. spatial/formal/material/programmatic systems framing and interconnecting the focal systems of site mesocosms

2. space, form, material and program more permeable to and interactive with human + natural flows + trajectories

3. program that adjoins new research activities with existing and educational ones with opposing Peano curve vectors

4. form as a kit-of-parts, pre-fabricated to facilitate affordable construction and reconfiguration