U of Ideas of General Interest -- February 1999 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Contact: Melissa Mitchell, Arts Editor (217) 333-5491; [email protected]
LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE Exhibition shows how designers' plans take environment into account
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Imagine a community park in Appalachia created to celebrate the area's social history and help solve acid-mine drainage problems. Or a wetlands area on a busy university campus that makes storm-water management an integral, visible part of the designed landscape.
Those are just two of the environmental transformations envisioned by landscape architects and documented in the traveling exhibition "Eco-Revelatory Design: Nature Constructed/Nature Revealed." Organized by the University of Illinois department of landscape architecture, the exhibition consists of 15 design projects -- both built and speculative -- that "reveal ecological phenomena, processes and relationships," according to Brenda Brown, a visiting scholar at the U. of I. and co-curator of the exhibit with U. of I. landscape architecture professors Terry Harkness and Douglas Johnston.
Brown, of Brenda Brown Landscape Design Art Research, Gainsville, Fla., said, that in this context, the curators are referring to ecology as "the interactive processes and dynamic relationships among organisms and their environments." And, she added, "while ecological design has sometimes been criticized for not taking into account the human factors involved, human beings are a major part of the processes" considered in "Eco-Revelatory Design."
The exhibition debuted in September 1998 at the U. of I., and will be at the Chicago Botanic Gardens March 6-April 11. From Sept. 12-Oct. 15, it will be at the Boston Architectural Center, where it will coincide with the 100th anniversary meeting of the American Society of Landscape Architects. Public outreach events related to "Eco-Revelatory Design" are planned in Chicago and Boston.
All but one of the sites considered in the exhibition -- some urban, some rural and suburban -- are scattered throughout the United States; one is in Germany. The contributing designers are from throughout the United States. In addition to the community park under construction in Vintondale, Penn., and the wetlands area proposed at the University of Virginia, other projects outline plans for creating a type of urban open space along the freeways of Los Angeles; reviving and reusing 72 acres of bedrock and 103 acres of landfill on New York's Governors Island; and developing a community-based master plan for an existing 80-acre hilltop park in Oakland, Calif.
"The works in this exhibit often build on lessons from environmental artists who became prominent in the 1960s and '70s -- artists such as Robert Smithson, Hans Haacke, Alan Sonfist, Michelle Stuart and Robert Irwin," Brown said. "These artists dealt with the nature of nature, particularly nature as process, and how we perceive it. Each work in this exhibit constructs a different sort of nature. Individually and collectively they work to reveal a larger, dynamic 'Nature.' "
Accompanying the exhibition is a color catalog that documents the projects and includes essays by some of the leading scholars and practitioners in landscape architecture-related fields. It also will function as a special issue of Landscape Journal. More information is available on on the World Wide Web: http://www.gis.uiuc.edu/ecorev.
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