Vineyards of Change: Santiago de Chile.

Vineyards of Change is a multisemester international design studio exploring viticulture as a landscape of cultural exchange, ecological stewardship, and postcolonial transformation. Linking the Maipo Valley (Chile), Alto Penedès (Catalonia), and Chicago’s emerging urban wine scene, the course investigates how wine landscapes—rooted in migration, resistance, and trade—can act as civic and ecological infrastructure across global climates and economies.

Students worked in collaborative teams across three nested scales: territorial infrastructures, vineyard ecologies, and the design of bodegas as public places of gathering, production, and tasting. Through these scales, the studio foregrounded the land as a living archive—one shaped by indigenous practices, colonial histories, and feminist innovations in contemporary winemaking.

The class contextualized winemaking as a shared Mediterranean practice, tracing historical connections between Catalonia and Chile, while highlighting uneven development in Chicago, where BIPOC and women-led wineries remain underrepresented. Students mapped patterns of soil, water, climate, and forest; reimagined resilient vineyard typologies; and proposed inclusive public architectures that bridge rural and metropolitan contexts.

Through drawing, dialogue, and territorial research, the studio framed viticulture not as commodity farming, but as cultural production with the power to regenerate landscapes and communities. The result is a collective, transatlantic vision that challenges extractive models and centers care, memory, and mutual knowledge.

This studio positions landscape as a protagonist of justice and connection—where wine becomes more than a product: it becomes a form of repair. It reclaims shared ancestralities through landscape, restoring ties between culture, place, and production.