“Because ‘territory’ is historical and mutable it does not beg for definition (as Nietzsche once said, ‘Only that which has no history can be defined . . .’). Rather, it is something to be described, mapped, modified, and entered into. One takes impressions of it, soundings and probes. As practitioners, we espouse it, deploy it, exploit it and harvest it. . .”
(Sanford Kwinter, “American Design?” Praxis 4: Landscapes, 2002)


Territory is strategic and scalable. It is the prompt for and the ground upon which to anchor the work we present in this volume. We invoke the relationship between territory and its root, terra, to emphasize how these projects are about places; they make design an act of responding to and revealing sites.

Rather than be defined by explicit border lines, territories are identified from within. This openness to overlap and hybridization nurtures ongoing discussions we find in our work about boundaries, both conceptually and spatially. In this body of work, we dwell within edge conditions as territories in their own right, exploring these at the scale of the body, the house, or a vast national border zone. We approach the city, enlisting productive landscape systems as generators of public space. We re-imagine water infrastructure as a way of interlocking ecological and cultural imperatives. The work included, we hope, begins to map the province of expertise engendered by the University of Virginia School of Architecture.

Charlottesville, VA
April 7, 2008

Editors:
Shanti Fjord Levy
David Malda

lunch Team:
Noah Bolton
Rob Couch
Harding Dowell
Zoe Edgecomb
Lauren Hackney
Tom Hogge
James Huemoeller
Karl Krause
James Quarles