Sonia Sobrino Ralston (she/her) is a spatial practitioner and researcher. Broadly, her interests lie in how landscape and architecture intersect with geopolitics and the history of technology. Her current projects focus on understanding how regimes historically attempted to establish control over landscapes using environmental media, and the alternative and dissenting systems that respond to them. Sonia recently graduated with distinction from the Harvard Graduate School of Design with a Master in Landscape Architecture, where she won the Digital Design Prize, the Landscape Architecture Thesis Prize, and the Norman T. Newton Prize. She also holds a Master of Architecture from Princeton University where she also received a certificate in Media and Modernity, and was awarded the Suzanne Kolarik Underwood Prize. Beyond this, she has worked as anassistant curator, research assistant, teaching assistant, architectural designer, exhibition designer, data visualizer, publication editor, and graphic designer at various institutions and organizations focused on spatial concerns.
Selected Work
01. Design
Utilizing Power
Directing Domains
Between 1-549
Assembly
02. Installation
Garden Party
03. Professional
metaLAB at Harvard︎︎︎
01. Design
Waste to GovernanceLOT ###
Utilizing Power
Directing Domains
Between 1-549
Assembly
02. Installation
Garden Party
03. Professional
Assistant Curator, 2022 Tallinn Architecture Biennale︎︎︎Design Collaborator,
metaLAB at Harvard︎︎︎
Archaeology of Architecture and Food
Fall 2022
Tallinn Architecture Biennale 2022, Tallinn,EE
Collaboration with Lydia Kallipoliti and Sanjana Lahiri
An archaeology of metabolic spatial practice
The Archeology of Architecture and Food explored edible architectures through the 20th and 21st centuries. Writing a minor history of architecture
through the lens of metabolism requires a categorization that responds to two conceptual forces, seemingly irreconcilable when thinking of built form. On the one hand, the architecture included in this archaeology was growing, consuming, producing energy, or rotting, thus placing it in a timeline of metabolic relationships on a material level. On the other
hand, the selected spatial projects were entangled with complex social, environmental, and political forces that inform their materiality over time. In a series of categories for conceptual and digestive processes–
Cultivating Consumption, Performing Ingestion, Territorializing Provision, Codifying Preparation, Systematizing Digestion, and Regulating Decomposition–we encouraged viewers to read these projects in constellations of material and political interrelationships.
The Archeology of Architecture and Food explored edible architectures through the 20th and 21st centuries. Writing a minor history of architecture
through the lens of metabolism requires a categorization that responds to two conceptual forces, seemingly irreconcilable when thinking of built form. On the one hand, the architecture included in this archaeology was growing, consuming, producing energy, or rotting, thus placing it in a timeline of metabolic relationships on a material level. On the other
hand, the selected spatial projects were entangled with complex social, environmental, and political forces that inform their materiality over time. In a series of categories for conceptual and digestive processes–
Cultivating Consumption, Performing Ingestion, Territorializing Provision, Codifying Preparation, Systematizing Digestion, and Regulating Decomposition–we encouraged viewers to read these projects in constellations of material and political interrelationships.
While the
organization of the installation acknowledges the chronological order, the various categories allow for new, non-linear readings to emerge, prompting
dialogue and cross-fertilization between otherwise disparate projects.
The exhibition was staged as a recipe cabinet and kitchen pantry, with precedents and their descriptions hanging from the shelves alongside food items, cooking utensils, maps, and recipe books. In framing the Archeology as a pantry, we wanted to present an incomplete history of architectural precedents from climate-oriented, anti-colonial, and feminist frameworks as a set of ingredients to think with, add to, and to develop futures for edible architecture informed by the thinking and knowledge of many voices, many contexts, and with many possible outcomes.
I led the design, research, and writing for the exhibition alongside my collaborators.
All photos by Tõnu Tunnel.
The exhibition was staged as a recipe cabinet and kitchen pantry, with precedents and their descriptions hanging from the shelves alongside food items, cooking utensils, maps, and recipe books. In framing the Archeology as a pantry, we wanted to present an incomplete history of architectural precedents from climate-oriented, anti-colonial, and feminist frameworks as a set of ingredients to think with, add to, and to develop futures for edible architecture informed by the thinking and knowledge of many voices, many contexts, and with many possible outcomes.
I led the design, research, and writing for the exhibition alongside my collaborators.
All photos by Tõnu Tunnel.
