Sonia Sobrino Ralston (she/her) is a Master of Landscape Architecture student at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Broadly, her interests lie in how landscape and architecture intersect with political geography, the history of technology, and social movements. Her current projects focus on understanding how regimes historically attempted to establish control over landscapes using scientific research campuses and information technology, and the alternative and dissenting systems that respond to them. She 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. Sonia is also a graduate of the University of Toronto’s Architectural and Urban Studies undergraduate program. Beyond this, she has worked as an assistant 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. Editorial
Party Planner︎︎︎
03. Installation
Garden Party
04. Professional
metaLAB at Harvard︎︎︎
01. Design
Waste to GovernanceLOT ###
Utilizing Power
Directing Domains
Between 1-549
Assembly
02. Editorial
Party Planner︎︎︎
Pidgin︎︎︎
03. Installation
Garden Party
04. Professional
Assistant Curator, 2022 Tallinn Architecture Biennale︎︎︎Design Collaborator,
metaLAB at Harvard︎︎︎
Waste to
Governance
Fall 2021
Harvard GSD Landscape Architecture Core III
Professor Robert Gerard Pietrusko
Making data infrastructure visible
As sea levels rise, toxicants are leached into soils, and environmental change increases, environmental data informs the spatial practice of retreat and design for climate. However, much of the environmental data we collect and use from organizations such as the EPA, while incredibly reliable, is difficult to access both intellectually and practically. This project imagines a new form of digital watershed governance that lays a grid for potential sensing stations across the territory to produce alternative forms of landscape sensing that support existing work on climate data. This grid of potential sites offers a suggestion for the collection of data as a political praxis to experience the granularity of climate change at the level of the neighbourhood and watershed, rather than layers of geospatial data housed in the depths of government agencies’ websites.
As sea levels rise, toxicants are leached into soils, and environmental change increases, environmental data informs the spatial practice of retreat and design for climate. However, much of the environmental data we collect and use from organizations such as the EPA, while incredibly reliable, is difficult to access both intellectually and practically. This project imagines a new form of digital watershed governance that lays a grid for potential sensing stations across the territory to produce alternative forms of landscape sensing that support existing work on climate data. This grid of potential sites offers a suggestion for the collection of data as a political praxis to experience the granularity of climate change at the level of the neighbourhood and watershed, rather than layers of geospatial data housed in the depths of government agencies’ websites.
Sensing data collected at sites in the grid activate as environmental pollution and are constructed by local environmental groups in need of greater monitoring, setting off a chain of new sensing towers as a plume of pollution grows. Yet, these sensing towers do not abandon traditional sensing altogether—sites include all of the standard functions of EPA monitoring stations—but they also include large plantings aimed to bioindicate both contaminants and long-term environmental change. The data center, sited at the Wheelabrator landfill in Saugus, serves as a public data center that can be accessed as-needed at an otherwise dead landscape. The data center supports the data collected through sensing stations, as well as serves as a public utility to generate capital and infrastructural means to contain contaminants that may leach from the landfill itself as the sea level rises.
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The surrounding context of the site is at severe risk of flooding, a problem could lead to the leaching of toxins into the protected salt marsh surrounding the landfill
Site 1: Public data centre
The public data centre serves as the centre of governance for the watershed’s stations. By using the data centre as a cap material, the site uses existing water pumping infrastructure that is part of the waste-to-energy systems to keep the inundating marsh afloat, but also to be treated and used as cooling water for the data centre. Despite having very different infrastructural and productive purposes, data centers and landfills have similar requirements which offers a fruitful reciprocity between these two programs.
The public data centre serves as the centre of governance for the watershed’s stations. By using the data centre as a cap material, the site uses existing water pumping infrastructure that is part of the waste-to-energy systems to keep the inundating marsh afloat, but also to be treated and used as cooling water for the data centre. Despite having very different infrastructural and productive purposes, data centers and landfills have similar requirements which offers a fruitful reciprocity between these two programs.
Site plan of the landfill as it becomes inundated by sea level rise. The data centre is added in the corner of the landfill that is currently active. A former berm in the salt marsh is moved and reconstituted as additional flood barriers to protect the infrastructure of the data centre.
Similarities in needs between landfills and data centers
Using the data centre as cap material
Retaining walls contain and heighten the berms, and valleys use plantings to filter and indicate toxicity levels to water flowing back into pumps for water treatment
Site 2: Lynn Triangle Waterfront
The Lynn triangle as imagined site for three long-term monitoring stations
Strategies to alter monitoring stations to become civic beacons
Planting plan for the waterfront, using plants found in the region in the 19th century, to contemporary plants, to plants found in Florida’s climate as a means to indicate climate change on a long timescale
The planting of the waterfront serves to replace aging bulkheads with a planted wetland to ease flood risk
Site 3: Lynn Triangle Inland
Monitoring stations reconfigured to appear as civic beacons
Taxonomy of plants from three regions to serve as bioindicators
Sited adjacent to an elementary school, the urban park aims to indicate saltwater intrusion as flooding in Lynn worsens over time among other climatic changes
The sloping site uses the varying root depth of plants to work as indicators in an inland setting