martin hogue

Constructing Sites

One does not impose, but rather expose the site.
Robert Smithson

Martin Hogue is an associate professor in the department of landscape architecture at Cornell University. Trained as an architect and landscape architect and working primarily with analytical drawings as a mode of inquiry, his research explores the notion of site as a cultural construction — specifically, the mechanisms by which locations become invested with the unique potential to acquire the designation of "site".

Following the advice of land artists like Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer, for whom "the work is not put in a place, it is that place," Hogue employs methodologies of design research to reconceive the site not as a point of departure, but rather as a constructive end product within architecture and landscape architecture. In Materiality Displaced, Organized, Flattened: Recording the Landscape (2018), for example, he discusses fieldwork techniques available to students and designers for collecting information on site visits; in [Fake] Fake Estates (2006), he proposes a new take on Gordon Matta-Clark’s seminal 1975 Fake Estates project, in which the artist purchased and later documented 14 residual land parcels at auction in Queens for $25 each (a 2.33’ x 355’ long strip of land, a 1.83’ x 1.11’ lot, among others). Most recently, he has taken an interest in camping culture in the United States, interrogating the discrepancies that exist between the deeply cherished American ideal of ruggedness and independence and the desire for an increasingly sophisticated range of utilities and conveniences. For Hogue, campgrounds indeed commodify into multiple sites — literally tens of thousands of them across the United States — the locus of this unique experience, each functioning as a stage upon which cultural fantasies can be performed in full view of an audience of nearby campers. Each in their own way, these projects foreground an obsessive degree of bureaucratic scrutiny that is directly responsible for the emergence of "sites" as discrete units within these respective systems.

Hogue has been supported with residencies and fellowships at the MacDowell Colony, the Center for Land Use Interpretation, the Canadian Center for Architecture, the Outdoor Recreation Archive, the University of Nebraska, as well as with funding from the New York State Council on the Arts and the J.M. Kaplan Fund. His work has been displayed in solo exhibits at over 25 venues across the United States, including The Ohio State University, Cornell University, the Urban Center in New York, the University of Southern California, and the Center for Land Use Interpretation. Hogue's research has also appeared in 306090, Adventure Journal, Architecture-Québec, Bracket, Dichotomy, Ground Magazine, the Journal of Architectural Education, Kerb, Landezine, Landscape Architecture Magazine, Landscape Journal, Landscript, Numéro, Pidgin, Places, and Thresholds. His book Thirtyfour Campgrounds was published at The MIT Press in November 2016. His second book, Making Camp: A Visual History of Camping's Most Essential Items and Activities, was published at Princeton Architectural Press in May 2023.

Download CV

Contact:martinhogue@cornell.edu

Selected Publications

Cue the Sun! Landscapes on Film
Landscape Architecture Magazine vol.115, no.2, February 2025, pp.78-89.
Download article

Preparing the Ground: The Landscape Transect
Revista de Arquitectura no.26, 2024.
Download article

Making Camp: A Visual History of Camping's Most Essential Items and Activities
Princeton Architectural Press, 2023. 336 pages.
Order on Amazon

An Illustrated History of the Picnic Table
Places journal, posted 05.23.18
Link to Places website

Matter Displaced, Organized, Flattened: Recording the Landscape
Landscript no 5: Material Culture (Berlin: Jovis Verlag, 2017), pp.174-193.
Download
Link to Jovis Verlag website

Thirtyfour Campgrounds
Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016. 272 pages.
Download introduction and sample pages
Link to MIT Press website

Fully Serviced
Bracket no 3: At Extremes (Actar: 2016), pp.38-44.
Download
Link to Bracket website

925,000 Campsites: The Commodification of an American Experience
Various venues, 2013-2017
Download the exhibit pamphlet.

Kampground, America
Places journal, posted 07.02.12.
Link to Places website

A Short History of the Campsite
Places Journal, posted 05.31.11
Link to Places website

Land, Speed, and Bonneville
Places journal, posted 08.09.10
Link to Places website

[Fake] Fake Estates: Reconsidering Gordon Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates
306090 volume 12 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2009), pp. 172-181.
Download

[Fake] Fake Estates: Reconsidering Gordon Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates
2006 exhibit booklet on sale at Printed Matter (New York), Art Metropole (Toronto), and Canadian Center for Architecture (Montreal). Original printing: 200 copies. Also included in Canadian Center for Architecture library collection.
Download

A Site Constructed: The Bonneville Salt Flats and the Land Speed Record, 1935-1970. Published in Landscape Journal 24:1 (2005), pp.32-49.
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Spiral Jetty- 08.2003
Field photographs included in Robert Smithson: Spiral Jetty (New York: Dia Center for the Arts, 2005), pp.42-45, 121.

Spiral Jetty- 08.2003
Field photograph featured on the cover of Bookforum, December 04 / January 05.

The Site as Project: Lessons From Conceptual Art and Land Art
Journal of Architectural Education vol. 57 no 3 (2004), pp.54-61.
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Spiral Jetty- 08.2003
Field photographs included in Robert Smithson (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2004), pp.96, 103.

Horizons: Exploring the Earthworks and Related Projects
Thresholds no 27 (2004), pp.66-75.
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News

Penn State University
Stuckeman School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture
Opening and gallery talk: August 27, 2014

08.09.2025: A Brief History of the Tent. Lecture at The Mountaineer, Keene Valley NY.

08.01.2025: Making Camp reviewed by Andrew J. Beaupré in Journal of Sport History, Summer 2025. Download

06.05.2025: A Brief History of the Tent. Lecture at REI Ithaca, NY. Link

05.13.2025: Making Camp reviewed by Nina J. Morris in Social & Cultural Geography, May 2025. Download review

02.26.2025: The Gearing of Food in Camping Cultrure: Outdoor Recreation Archive symposium. Registration link

02.01.2025: Cue the Sun! Landscapes on Film published in Landscape Architecture Magazine. Download article

02.01.2025: Making Camp translated in Simplified Chinese by China Science and Technology Press. Link

01.15.2025: Hold Still published on Landezine. Link

11.01.2024: Making Camp translated in Complex Chinese by The Commercial Press. Link

10.17.2024: Preparing the Ground: The Landscape Transect is published in issue 26 of Revista de Arquitectura, edited by Miguel Guitart. Link to table of contents. Download article

09.29.2024: Making Camp is one of 3 alternate finalists for the John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize from the Center for Cultural Places at the University of Virginia, which was awarded to Rosetta Elkin for Landscapes of Retreat. Link

08.23.2024: Martin Hogue and Making Camp on California's KSQD FM, Central Coast, CA. Link to book review and podcast interview

08.11.24 to 08.21.2024: Research fellowship at Outdoor Recreation Archive, Utah State University. Link

05.30.2024: Bins, Bags, Boxes and Bottles. Lecture at Clark Sports Center, Cooperstown, NY.

05.11.2024: Bins, Bags, Boxes and Bottles. Lecture at Green Lakes State Park, Fayetteville, NY.

04.12.2024: What's in a Thesis? Cornell University, Department of Landscape Architecture lecture series.

03.01.2024: Martin Hogue on North Words with Mitch Teich, North County Public Radio (NCPR). Link

12.11.2023: A Good Time Coming: Making Camp and the ADKX. Lecture at the Adirondack Experience Museum. Link. Recording

11.08.2023: A Brief History of the Tent. Keynote lecture at the Utah State University, Outdoor History Summit. Link. Recording

11.01.2023: Making Camp reviewed in November issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine.

10.24.2023: Bins, Bags, Boxes and Bottles. Lecture at the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History Tuesday Colloquium.

10.01.2023: Making Camp reviewed in September-October issue of Harvard Magazine.

09.26.2023: Martin Hogue on Finneran's Wake posdcast. Link

09.14.2023: Making Camp: Made at Cornell, Cornell University Chats in the Stacks lecture series. Link. Recording

08.11.2023: A Brief History of the Campfire lecture, Stone Quarry Hill Art Park, Cazenovia, New York.

08.10.2023: Camping at the Art Park opens at Stone Quarry Hill Art Park, Cazenovia, New York. Link

07.12.2023: Making Camp: A Visual History of Camping's Most Essential Items and Activities featured in Cornell Chronicle. Written by James Dean. Link

06.01.2023: The Campfire as the Heart of the Camp by Martin Hogue featured on Medium. Link

05.12.2023: Making Camp featured on USA Today's Outdoor Wire. Written by Glae Gleason. Link

05.09.2023: Making Camp: A Visual History of Camping's Most Essential Items and Activities is released at Princeton Architectural Press. Link

05.07.2023: The First Campgrounds Took the City to the Wilderness published on the History News Network. Link

05.01.2023: Making Camp: A Visual History of Camping's Most Essential Items and Activities reviewed in ForewordReviews.com. Link

04.26.2023: Making Camp: A Visual History of Camping's Most Essential Items and Activities cited in The Seattle Times' "Everything You Need To Go Camping in Washington," written by Gregory Scruggs. Link

12.26.2022: Making Camp: A Visual History of Camping's Most Essential Items and Activities included in Fast Company's 7 design books to look forward to in 2023. Link

12.13.2022: Furthermore grant in publishing for Making Camp: A Visual History of Camping's Most Essential Items and Activities. Link

11.10.2022: Making Camp: A Visual History of Camping's Most Essential Items and Activities (Princeton Architectural Press, 2023) available for pre-order. Link

09.23.2022: [Fake] Fake Estates: Reconsidering Gordon Matta-Clark's Fake Estates on view at Timișoara Architecture Biennial, Romania. Link

08.11.2022: Tracing camping’s evolution, from Adirondacks to art park. Interview published in Cornell Chronicle. Link.

05.16.2022: Reservations for June Camping at the Art Park Now Open. Eagle News Online. Link

03.18.2022: Excellence in Studio Teaching Award (senior level), Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture.

01.10.2022: The Wildly Wilds of Yosemite published in "Kerb" 29. Link

01.10.2022: Thirtyfour Campgrounds now available as audiobook (abridged version). Link

09.03.2021: The Site as Project lecture, Iowa State University.

03.19.2021: Making Camp under contract with Princeton Architectural Press.

12.10.2020: Semester (un)interrupted: Innovative teaching in the hybrid semester. Cornell CALS newsletter. Link

07.23.2020: A Brief History of the Tent lecture, Rhode Island School of Design.

03.06.2020: Camping at the Art Park receives an Award of Merit from the New York Upstate Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects.

11.08.2019: Earth: Projections 50 Years After Land Art symposium at Cornell University. Link

06.07.2019: Camping at the Art Park residency kicks off at Stone Quarry Hill Art Park in Cazenovia, NY

03.22.2019: Field Verified: presented at Urban Inventories conference, Centre de Design, Université du Québec à Montréal. Recording.

03.06.2019: Public lecture, School of Architecture, Marywood University.

07.14.2018: A Short History of the Campground published in "Adventure Journal", issue 09. Link

06.13.2018: Camping at the Art Park interview on NPR's Morning Edition, WAER 88.3 FM (NPR Syracuse University).

06.01.2018: Camping at the Art Park residency kicks off at Stone Quarry Hill Art Park in Cazenovia, NY. Link.

05.23.2018: An Illustrated History of the Picnic Table published in "Places". Link

05.14.2018: 150 Years of Camping: From the Wilds of the Adirondacks to the Stone Art Park in Cazenovia lecture, Cazenovia Public Library.

03.12.18: From Scratch...To Scratched-Out: An Alternative History of Kampgrounds of America. Published in "Journal of Architectural Education" vol. 72 no. 1. Link

10.16.2017: Matter Displaced, Organized, Flattened: Recording the Landscape . Published in "Landscript" no. 5: Material Culture. Link

09.03.2017: #Thirtyfour Campgrounds on Instagram, one page at a time. Link

08.29.2017: Thirtyfour Campgrounds reviewed on Spacing.ca. Link

08.21.2017: Camping in the Dark: Thirtyfour Campgrounds and the Path of Totality on The MIT Press website blog. Link

08.14.2017: 5 Really Great Campsites on The MIT Press website blog. Link

07.20.2017: Thirtyfour Campgrounds reviewed on Archidose. Link

06.02.2017: Thirtyfour Campgrounds reviewed on hyperallergic.com. Link

06.02.2017: Camping at the Art Park residency kicks off at Stone Quarry Hill Art Park in Cazenovia, NY. Link.

05.03.2017: Recipient of the SUNY ESF College Foundation Award for Exceptional Achievement in teaching.

05.03.2017: Recipient of honorary membership in the Sigma Lambda Alpha Honor Society, SUNY ESF Department of landscape architecture.

04.27.2017: After Drawing lecture, Department of Architecture, South Dakota State University.

04.21.2017: Thirtyfour Campgrounds Q&A on The MIT Press website blog. Link

04.12.2017: 925,000 Campsites exhibit reception, Donald G. Butcher Library, SUNY Morrisville.

03.08.2017: Thirtyfour Campgrounds reception and gallery talk at State University of New York, College of Environmental Science and Forestry. Link

02.23.2017: Thirtyfour Campgrounds book launch at Van Alen Institute, New York. Link

12.01.2016: 65 Drawings lecture at Lawrence Technical University. Link

11.28.2016: Evolution of camping shows Americans want to be closer to nature, but not too close. Interview on 'Stateside with Cynthia Canty', Michigan Public Radio. Link

11.04.2016: Thirtyfour Campgrounds released on MIT Press. 272 pages. MIT Press link. amazon.com link

11.01.2016: Martin Hogue on his book 'Thirtyfour Campgrounds' interview in ROROTOKO. Link

11.01.2016: 925,000 Campsites exhibit opens at Lawrence Technical University. Link

09.08.2016: 925,000 Campsites exhibit reception and gallery talk at Parsons' School of Constructed Environments. Link

09.08.2016: 925,000 Campsites exhibit opens at Parsons' School of Constructed Environments, 35 East 13th Street Gallery.

09.01.2016: Fully Serviced published in "Bracket" 3: At Extremes. Link

08.27.2016: How camping technology made us feel at home in nature. Video interview on The Verge with Ashley Carman. Link

08.16.2016: Talk of Iowa: From Canvas Tents to Class A Motorhomes. Iowa Public Radio, hosted by Charity Nebbe. Link

03.21.2016: 925,000 Campsites exhibit reception and gallery talk at University of Southern California School of Architecture. Link

03.12.2016: 925,000 Campsites exhibit opens at University of Southern California School of Architecture.

03.05.2016: Drawing with Drawings lecture and workshop at State University at Buffalo College of Architecture and Planning.

02.01.2016: 925,000 Campsites back story feature in "Landscape Architecture Magazine" by Zach Mortice.

11.16.2015: 925,000 Campsites exhibit opens at Ball State University College of Architecture and Planning.

11.11.2015: Thirtyfour Campgrounds under contract with MIT Press. 250 pages. Expected publication: Fall 2016. Link

10.21.2015: Thirtyfour Campgrounds awarded grant from New York State Council on the Arts.

02.19.2015: 925,000 Campsites exhibit opens at Circle Gallery, University of Georgia College of Environment+Design. Link

10.31.2014: 4 Drawings lecture in the Department of Landscape Architecture, Cal Poly Pomona.

10.30.2014: 925,000 Campsites exhibit reception and gallery talk at at Huntley Gallery, Cal Poly Pomona, sponsored jointly by the Department of Landscape Architecture and the Department of Geography and Anthropology . Link

10.05.2014: 925,000 Campsites exhibit opening at WUHO Gallery (Woodbury University Hollywood Outpost) with panel discussion featuring Martin Hogue, Peter Blodgett from the Huntington Library and Terry Young from Cal Poly Pomona. Link

10.02.2014: 925,000 Campsites exhibit opens WUHO Gallery in Los Angeles.

08.27.2014: 4 Drawings lecture and exhibit reception at Penn State University, Stuckeman School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. Link

08.18.2014: 925,000 Campsites exhibit opens at Penn State University's Rouse Gallery in the Stuckeman School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture.

05.09.2014: 925,000 Campsites exhibit opens at the University of Colorado, Denver.

04.02.2014: 925,000 Campsites exhibit reception and gallery talk at at Temple Hoyne Buell Hall gallery, University of Illinois.

03.31.2014: 925,000 Campsites exhibit opens in at Temple Hoyne Buell Hall gallery, University of Illinois College of Applied+Fine Arts.

03.23.2014: Tackling the Task of Drawing: St-Louis architect Eric Shripka on Martin Hogue's work. Link

03.19.2014: 4 Drawings lecture at Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts, Washington University in St-Louis.

02.17.2014: 925,000 Campsites exhibit opens in at Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts, Washington University in St-Louis.

02.07.2014: Hyde lecture at University of Nebraska explores the role of drawing in research.

02.07.2014: 925,000 Campsites exhibit reception at University of Nebraska College of Architecture.

01.21.2014: 925,000 Campsites exhibit opens at University of Nebraska College of Architecture.

01.2014: The Cinematic Flâneur: Film and Site Exploration published in "Ground" Magazine issue on New Media. Link

11.11.2013: 925,000 Campsites exhibit opens at State University of New York, College of Environmental Science and Forestry with reception and gallery talk.

10.21.2013: 925,000 Campsites exhibit reception and gallery talk at Cornell University.

10.07.2013: 925,000 Campsites exhibit opens at Cornell University, College of Architecture, Art and Design. Link

01.31.2013: opening of Vive La Ville! group exhibit at Centre d'exposition de l'Université de Montréal honors architect, artist and educator Melvin Charney (1935 - 2012). Link

07.02.2012: Kampground, America published in "Places". Link

02.26.2012: camping research paper delivered at American Association of Geographers (AAG) annual meeting, New York.

03.03.2012: Un-Privileged Views group exhibit opens at WUHO Gallery, Los Angeles. Link

11.14.2011: last showing of [Fake] Fake Estates exhibit at Hobart and William Smith Colleges opens with reception and gallery talk.

05.31.2011: A Short History of the Campsite published in "Places". Link

04.15.2011: panel discussion for book release of GeoHumanities: Art, History, Text at the Edge of Place (Routledge, 2010), American Association of Geographers (AAG) annual meeting, Seattle.

04.15.2011: camping research paper delivered at American Association of Geographers (AAG) annual meeting, Seattle.

04.14.2011: [Fake] Fake Estates appears in GeoHumanities: Art, History, Text at the Edge of Place (Routledge, 2010). Link

03.04.2011: Films That Look Like Drawings (Drawings That Look Like Films) lecture and workshop, Illinois Institute of Technology. Link

University of Illinois
College of Applied+Fine Arts
Temple Hoyne Buell Hall gallery
March 21, 2016
Exhibit: March 31 - April 11, 2014

February 2014

Making Camp

Making Camp: A Visual History of Camping's Most Essential Items and Activities
Princeton Architectural Press
May 2023
336 pages
A visual exploration and history of one of America's favorite pastimes.
Download Introduction and sample chapter

Order your copy from your favorite retailer:
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Books-A-Million
Bookshop
Indiebound
Amazon UK
Indigo (Canada)
Urban Outfitters

Bruce Davidson, Camp Ground No. 4, Yosemite National Park, 1966.

About the Book
Lamentable is the fact, that during the six days given over to creation, picnic tables and outdoor fireplaces, footbridges and many other of man’s requirements, even in natural surroundings, were negligently and entirely overlooked.
Albert H. Good, architectural consultant for the National Park Service (1935)

Car camping, hike-in tent camping, bivouacking, mountaineering, RV camping, glamping, backyard camping . . . whatever your style, outdoor adventure awaits! For camping enthusiasts, this fascinating (and packable) volume holds a comprehensive look at the origins of the practice and the ways that bring all these enthusiasts together.

From the early days of recreational camping in the late nineteenth century through the multitude of modern camping options available today, Making Camp explores the history and evolution of the popular activity through the lens of its most important and familiar components: the campsite, the campfire, the picnic table, the map, the tent, the sleeping bag, as well as the oft invisible systems for delivering water and managing trash.

Find out how early nineteenth century German peasants fashioned rudimentary sleeping bags by burrowing into bags full of leaves for the night. Look back over several millennia to learn about the progression of tents from animal skins, goat's hair, and heavy canvas to featherweight nylon. Learn about the ways in which the skills to build and maintain a campfire have been displaced by the portable gas stove. Pinpoint the details of the essential campground map and its unique place in the camping imagination.

Each chapter includes a broad range of visuals to help illustrate the rich history of camping and our collective devotion to it, including drawings, patents, diagrams, sketches, paintings, advertisements, and historical photographs. A must-have for avid campers, nature lovers, and all who seek to connect with the universe by sleeping under the stars.

MAKING CAMP, CHAPTER BY CHAPTER:

1. Water
Late nineteenth-century recreational campers often mistakenly placed their trust in quaint, scenic, roadside tableaus; little did they know that the sparkling water from a cold, clear stream might be polluted by a nearby town or even by other campers upstream. Nowadays, there is little to distinguish the potable water inside large public campgrounds from that which can be found in any municipality: it issues freely from water taps, is available hot or cold in showers, washing basins, and services flush toilets connected to modern sewer systems. For the off-grid, backpacking enthusiast, a discussion of water will also include a range of equipment like bottles and hydration reservoirs, filters, purifiers, and portable showers.
A family camping and fishing by a stream in the San Bernardino Mountains in California, 1900.

2. Campfire
Long considered the social and functional heart of the camp as well as an important test of skill, the wood fire has been supplanted by modern gear like the lightweight gas stove, on which a full cooking flame can be attained within seconds.
John Singer Sargent, Tents at Lake O’Hara, 1916.

3. Campsite
In the early days of late nineteenth-century recreational camping, wilderness enthusiasts simply hiked into the woods and settled on a spot they deemed promising, based on its scenic value, its proximity to a stream or lake, and other key factors. Today, the campsite unctions as the standard unit of management of any campground. Campers settle in and out of predetermined spots, with new visitors arriving only hours after the very same site has been vacated by its previous occupants.
Internet at campsite, Ferry Island Campground, Terrace, British Columbia, Canada, 2008.

4. Map
Early campgrounds were no more than large open fields inside which campers, along with their tents and motor vehicles, were confined. The emergence of campground maps during the 1930s suggests that this spatial territory quickly became far more complex and needed to be carefully managed. The map plays a dual role, acting as a geospatial reference for its occupants, while simultaneously perpetuating a unique spatial code of one-way driving loops, automobile parking spurs, and RV pull-throughs that underpins the generic layouts of over 20,000 campgrounds nationwide.
A park ranger checks in newly arrived campers at Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, 2012.

5. Picnic Table
Sitting in camp was often improvised using local materials—a simple log might present a serviceable bench, for example, while experienced campers traveled with foldable tables and chairs or simply crafted their own furniture by lashing together sticks and branches. A place to congregate, to prepare and eat food, the picnic table has become a deep part of the American vernacular not only in campgrounds but nationwide, to the extent that we cease to recognize the origins of this highly singular form.
Arthur Wigram Allen and his brother Boyce on a picnic in Sutton Forest, Australia, 1900.

6. Tent
Tents predate recreational camping by several millennia, however the structure remains the single most iconic element of camping gear. When driving tent stakes into the ground, the camper establishes a tangible, if temporary, connection with place. The technological innovations following the invention of nylon by the DuPont Company in 1940 have propelled the tent as a center of research and innovation with respect to weight, compactness, permeability, durability, and structural stability.
Architect, engineer and inventor R. Buckminster Fuller under an early prototype of the Dome tent on a visit to The North Face, 1970.

7. Sleeping Bag
A Point Blanket? A Bed Roll? A Sleeping Robe? Even the name could not be agreed on. An artifact of modern manufacturing, the sleeping bag is a relatively recent invention dating back to the 1870s, when commercial entrepreneurs like the Welshman Sir Pryce Pryce-Jones (1834-1920) contracted with the Russian Army to deliver 60,000 units of his Euklisia Rug, a patented, sewn blanket featuring a built-in, airtight pillow. Other technologies such as the zipper (1913), nylon, and other synthetic fibers combined to affect the sleeping bag’s compactness, weight, and insulating value. A history of the sleeping bag would not be complete without a discussion of mattresses, cots, and bedding, all of which affect comfort and experience.
Petty Officer Edgar Evans and Tom Crean mending their sleeping bags during Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s British Antarctic Expedition of 1910–1913.

8. Trash
The histories of sewage, water and trash management systems have always been closely linked in campgrounds. While bear-proof trash bins, RV dumping stations, and incinerators and landfills run counter to romantic notions of wilderness and are best kept out of view (and out of mind), this “landscape we do not see” is one of the most critical parts of the camping experience.
Lunch Counter—For Bears Only, Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, ca.1930.

A VISUAL HISTORY
Making Camp is a single book, but one that is formed by putting two records side by side, one written, one graphic. Each written page is matched by illustrated counterparts selected from a range of representations, including master plans, maps, technical drawings, patents, diagrams, cartoons, sketches, paintings, advertisements, and photographs. The book gains its subtitle by combining both in equal measure and, at its essence, presents a history of graphic specifications similar to the one the architect Albert Good first authored nearly ninety years ago in the classic 1935 book Park Structures and Facilities.

Drinking Fountain, Lake Guernsey State Park, Wyoming, Albert H. Good, ed., Park Structures and Facilities, 1935

Ferdinand Eberhardt, Combined Tent and Ground Floor Cloth, US Patent 1,057,628., 1913

Jennifer K. Mann, The Camping Trip, 2020

Proposed layout of a camping ground under regulation, with system of one-way roads, E. P. Meinecke, A Camp Ground Policy, 1932

W. J. Enright, illustration in Frederick Van de Water, The Family Flivvers to Frisco, 1927

Latrine, Horace Kephart, Camping and Woodcraft, 4th ed., 1940

Thirtyfour Campgrounds

The MIT Press, 2016
272 pages
Download introduction and sample pages
Link to MIT Press website
Link amazon.com website
Link to Audiobook (abridged)

Thirtyfour Campgrounds examines the standardization and modernization of the contemporary campground as a familiar setting in the American landscape. The book is a highly visual undertaking that features a combination of original drawings, archival materials and field documentation. The core of the book consists of a survey of color photographs of nearly 6,500 individual campsites retrieved from online reservation services like reserveamerica.com and recreation.gov. These photographs, arrayed into orderly girds and sequenced by zipcode and site number, span more than 200 of the book’s 272 pages. Taken together, these photos document 34 whole campgrounds of every stripe (federal, state, private) across the United States.

As a work of landscape and photography, Thirtyfour Campgrounds offers a nod to important artists who have expressed an interest for documenting similar generic settings: the title of the book is a direct reference to Ed Ruscha’s classic 1967 Thirtyfour Parking Lots (down to the idiosyncratic spelling of its title), which features aerial views of empty parking lots of all shapes and sizes in the Los Angeles area. The neutral, systematic arrangement of the thousands of campsite images in the book into grid form owes to German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher’s typological studies of blast furnaces, cooling towers, grain elevators and other industrial structures, and whose work are staples of contemporary art collections.

Campgrounds celebrate a unique form of American ingenuity in which intersecting narratives and desires (wilderness, individuality, access, speed, comfort, nostalgia, profit) find themselves strangely and powerfully hybridized. Thirtyfour Campgrounds traces the 150 year evolution of this unique landscape type. More broadly, however, the book poses important questions about the relationship between landscape and data: with a few clicks, taps or swipes, prospective campers now visit dozens of campgrounds and potentially hundreds of individual campsites in a single seating, comparing their advantages and disadvantages. How did we go from brave hikers setting up camp from scratch in the wilderness of the Adirondacks, to remotely browsing, shopping for, and reserving campsites in real time, often weeks or months in advance of arrival? How does the consumption of vast amounts of information through maps and websites shape our experience of campgrounds as landscapes? Are these landscapes themselves shaped by this information?

Experience some of these campgrounds in cinematic form, at 6 campsites / frames per second:

04679
Seawall campground
Acadia National Park
National Park Service
Southwest Harbor, Maine
195 campsites

46970
Missisinewa Lake campground
Indiana Department of Natural Resources
Peru, Indiana
403 campsites

50020
Lake Anita State Park
Iowa Department of Natural Resources
Anita, Iowa
161 campsites

50020
Fort Stevens State Park campground
Oregon Parks and Recreation Department
Hammond, Oregon
497 campsites

November 2016

Camping at the Art Park

Download the 2019 camper's informational pamphlet
Download the 2023 camper's informational pamphlet

With its 104 acres of conserved land and four miles of trails, Stone Quarry Hill Art Park overlooks the breathtaking rural landscape of Cazenovia and Madison County in Central New York. Inspired by the relationship between art and nature, the Art Park is dedicated to providing a unique environment for emerging and established artists to produce and showcase works in natural and gallery settings. Its mission is to educate and engage people about landscape through exhibitions, workshops, tours, and community outreach programs in the arts. Since its incorporation in 1991, over 100 artists from 19 states and 8 foreign countries have created site-specific artworks, both permanent and temporary.

Proposed in the context of an artist residency at Stone Quarry Hill, Camping at the Art Park is a performance and temporary installation that helps broaden the range of experiences available to visitors. Four campsites were carefully selected across the property that highlight unique spatial opportunities (inside a meadow or a wooded area, for example), each in proximity of key sculptures or dramatic vistas of and beyond the park.

The campsites are situated within a few minutes walking distance of a communal service hub featuring bathrooms, drinking water, and even wi-fi, and where campers can also prepare their food over the live flame of a communal fire pit. The picnic tables that mark the individual sites, as well as all related infrastructure of the campground (map, signage, flashlights, wheelbarrow) are painted in a bright shade of cyan to enhance their coherence as a system inside the Art Park.

Camping at the Art Park is scheduled to take place during every weekend in June 2017, beginning on Friday afternoon and ending on Sunday morning. But in fact, this experience has begun a lot sooner: visitors have claimed their campsite weeks in advance using a map and online reservation system on the Art Park’s website, as is the practice in thousands of campgrounds across the United States. As they arrive at the Art Park, wheelbarrow their equipment from the main parking area and later pitch their tents and lay out their sleeping bags, the campers take on dual roles as both consumers and participants: even if the park is open 365 days a year from dawn to dusk, camping provides a unique opportunity to spend 48 uninterrupted hours within the landscape of the Art Park; at the same time, the campers themselves also become part of the art inside the park, which is to say that they and their encampments are on display for visitors to see. At the end of June, the picnic tables will go into storage, the fire pit will be dismantled, and there will be very little evidence that the Art Park was, for one month, a campground. Only memories will remain—until next year.

June 2019

[Fake] Fake Estates: Reconsidering Gordon Matta-Clark's Fake Estates

Gordon Matta-Clark, Fake Estates ("Little Alley", Block 2497, Lot 42), Queens, 1973

Download the 32 page exhibit booklet
Purchase the booklet from Printed Matter, New York
Download the article published in 306090

Introduction

One does not impose, but rather exposes the site.1
Robert Smithson

Within architectural thought and process, the site is traditionally thought of as a physical location, a piece of ground that is bound to the earth and subject to its physical laws. Site is also commonly conceived as a location for an intervention; a neutral or unfinished “lot” to be completed by an architectural project. Site and project are often thought to be distinct, one making way for the other.

Work performed in the context of Land and Conceptual Art provides a unique challenge to these assumptions. In these works, the site and the project are understood as interwoven in the production of art. For artists like Robert Smithson, Walter de Maria, and Gordon Matta-Clark, the “site” is integral to the activities of reflection (design) and making (production). The location of the work is established by the artist and the material qualities often emerge from a manipulation of found conditions as much as from new construction. In such projects, the “site” not only invites artistic activity but often constitutes its constructive result.

The Fake Estates

Best known for his spatially dynamic extractions of large sections of walls and floors from abandoned buildings, in 1975 Gordon Matta-Clark purchased thirteen parcels of residual land in Queens, NY, that had been deemed “gutter space” or “curb property” and put on sale for $25 each. These properties, a 2.33’ x 355’ long strip of land, a 1.83’ x 1.11’ lot, and other similarly unusual lots, were purchased with the goal of highlighting neglected architectural environments that make up the urban and suburban fabric. Many were literally inaccessible and landlocked between buildings or other properties. The artist created an exhibit of his newly acquired “properties” by assembling a photographic inventory of each site, and, with deadpan accuracy, its exact dimensions and location, as well as the deed to the property. For Matta-Clark, “the unusability of this land—and the verification of space through the laws of property—is [the] principal object of [his] critique”2

As an architect, what has long fascinated me about the Fake Estates was the unbuildabuility of the parcels—that is, their inability to receive a building in the traditional sense. Matta-Clark is suggesting rhetorically that a site could be something else than a piece of land to receive a building. Furthermore, I was fascinated with the idea that an act of documentation could constitute an end result in itself. Within architecture, the act of documenting a site is perceived as transitory at best: the site eventually makes way for the project. Before the period in which the architect is involved intellectually with the site, this location exists merely as a place of unfocused attention—a place that doesn’t command any specific meaning attached to architecture or building. In short, the site exists because it captures the architect’s attention, his or her energies and skills. Architects record impressions and construct representations of the site that will enable them to visualize and conceptualize its attributes while not physically being there, at least not at all times: measurements, photographs of critical features, surrounding context, light orientation and all other features are noted for later reference. More often than not, the site exists in the mind through these constructed representations. In short, as a product of the architect’s own making and decisions, the representations become the site. The idea raises some interesting questions: can the site constitute an end product within architecture? Is a constructed site somehow less than a building?

The [Fake] Fake Estates

[Fake] Fake Estates: Reconsidering Gordon Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates emerged as an attempt to address some of these issues. Here, the Fake Estates become both a site to be critically reinvested as well as the starting point for other, more speculative endeavors. I began this project by spending several months systematically canvassing the entire borough of Queens for residual properties similar to the thirteen parcels purchased and documented by Matta-Clark in 1975. Canvassing for these properties occurred in two ways: online browsing through the New York City property database and visual consultation of the 25 Sanborn Map catalogs that make up the borough of Queens.

Browsing through this database occurs in a linear fashion, by moving forward or backward, one property after another.3 The nearly one million properties that comprise the database are organized chronologically- first by borough (Manhattan: 1, Bronx: 2, Brooklyn: 3, Queens: 4, Staten Island: 5), then by block number, and finally by individual lot number within each city block. For example, 5246 70th Street in Queens is also known as lot 4-2497-39 (borough-block-property). In all, nearly 16,500 blocks and 365,000 properties are found in the borough of Queens alone. Properties in this database are assigned individual pages, independent of their size, location, use, and value. The neutrality of the system (1 page = 1 property) leads to some interesting comparisons: the 10 cheapest residual lots found in Queens (which have a combined value of $292), occupy 10 pages in the database, while JFK International Airport, whose value exceeds nine billion dollars, occupies only six pages in the same database.

The linear labeling system organizes the 1 million properties chronologically, beginning with the first property in Manhattan (borough 1) and ending with the last property in Staten Island (borough 5). This online browsing offers a peculiar sense of geography in that it does not reveal that consecutive properties in the database (the last lot on a city block and the first on the next) can literally be located miles apart. Through the database, the city is presented as a series of individual fragments, each one click away from the next, undermining the city’s organization of streets, fabric, public spaces and buildings.

Animation by Mark Warfel, based on drawings and script by Martin Hogue

This single line can, in turn, also be represented in geographical terms by corresponding each point along this line to its physical location on a map of the city. Given the visual rigidity of the online interface and the mechanical nature of the search process—once click at a time, moving from one property to the next—this survey took nearly six months to complete [image: excel spreadsheet detail]. Browsing through more than a few thousand properties at a time proves difficult: each entry must be read through for at least a few seconds (what is its value? Its size?) before moving on to the next. While the online search was inevitably quite systematic (my initial search criteria called for all properties under $10,000 to be recorded), the process of browsing through the maps of the Sanborn atlases was less rigorous in nature, for some unique spatial arrangements of properties are often easily recognizable, while others can be difficult to spot with the naked eye.

The online database search yielded a number of properties which, by virtue of their minuscule size, are literally invisible in the Sanborn atlases: a 1/8” x 110’ property (4-8099-145-E), for example would read graphically on a map as no more wide than any line marking an edge between 2 adjacent properties. While these properties share physical characteristics with Matta-Clark’s original parcels, these 1,800 properties in this new survey of properties under $10,000 are inauthentic only in the sense that they were not purchased by the artist. If Matta-Clark’s purchases were a play on words on the idea of real estate, then this new survey could only be identified as being comprised of "fake" Fake Estates.

[Fake] Fake Estates exhibit installation, Ohio State University, 2006
The agency of the map

The unexpected discovery of the 1/8”x110’ parcel after months of careful data mining constitutes an excellent example of the goals of the project as they were shaped by the difficult online search. This project seeks to visually articulate the agency of maps through a consideration of those moments when conventions for establishing the location and the precise boundaries of a site produce a conceptual “excess of surveying.” Maps constitute not simply a way to locate parcels—in a way, one might argue that the Fake Estates and the [Fake] Fake Estates are by-products of mapping and surveying activities. Indeed, many such lots emerged historically as errors and subsequent adjustments to land surveys, where earlier property demarcations (farms, individual villages, etc…), conflicted with rapid and chaotic development throughout the borough of Queens at the cusp of the 20th century.

Can maps help highlight some of these absurdities? While often invisible to the naked eye, the boundaries within a map often split individual blocks or homes, administratively dividing coherent spatial wholes into distinct entities—an interesting reference to Matta-Clark’s own work. I was particularly interested in Matta-Clark’s own use of the Sanborn maps in the Fake Estates. Taken critically as graphic artifacts, the Sanborn conventions—their use of lot numbering system, their delineation of individual properties—seemed to suggest an abnormally large amount of graphic “space” with respect to some of the dimensions of individual properties themselves.

Suggesting a similarly intense consideration of the city’s administrative minutia, the [Fake] Fake Estates drawings operate at a variety of scales: the urban scale of New York City as a whole, the borough, a city block, or even the more intimate contact with a single, full scale plot. Several [Fake] Fake Estates are indeed so small that they are inferior in size to a regularly-sized map or even the dimensions of this very book. Such ironies undermine the role played by the map in articulating spatial relationships within a large territory, while intensifying its role as an active agent of surveying and land subdivision.

The absurd title of the Lots Under $2,000 drawing (above), for example, simultaneously constitutes the drawing’s driving criterion and is meant to underscore the rich number of inexpensive lots in the borough of Queens. Out of the original survey of [Fake] Fake Estates, 714 properties were found to be worth $2,000 or less. The system of dots records geographical location, ownership (black for private, red for city, state, or federal), lot size (diameter), and cost (increasing density denote greater value) of individual properties. The visual density of dots in the drawing exposes specific patterns- the prevalence of red, or publicly owned lots, for example, or the density of cheap lots along the shared border between Queens and Nassau counties.

Other drawings seek to contextualize these properties by comparing their relative dimensions and proportions to one another and to that of more commonly accepted scaling references—namely the human body and the standard Queens lot. In the latter, the 25x100’ lot ironically becomes a constructed end result, cobbled together from various scraps of land; in the former, an installation of some of these very same properties, inspired by Robert Smithson’s Nonsites (1967), allows one to gauge the true size of some of these lots by engaging them at full scale on the floor of the gallery [image: gallery installation photo]. The lot shapes sit on the floor of the gallery and are presented perspectivally to the viewer as planes while the maps and drawings, hung on the wall at eye level, appear in orthographic projection as an undistorted plan image. Thus the same site is presented two ways: one concerned with the experience of sight, the other with an intellectualization or rationalization of the land.

[Fake] Fake Estates exhibit installation, Syracuse University, 2006

Conclusion

One might be tempted to read far too literally into dimensions as a means to survey the site. James Corner, writing in Taking Measures Across the American Landscape, has warned against the strict instrumentality of measures, adding that measures can instead constitute “a form of contemplative survey,” an “act of taking stock of a richly constructed inheritance”.4 Like Matta-Clark, the goal of this project is not to physically intervene on sites which we assume not to have architectural potential; rather, it is to take delight in the fact that the city as a whole—literally, every square inch of it—is fully accounted for.

Notes

1. Nancy Holt, ed., The Writings of Robert Smithson (New York: New York University Press, 1979), p.47.
2. Pamela Lee, Object to Be Destroyed- The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), p.104.
3. https://nycserv.nyc.gov/nycproperty/nynav/jsp/selectbbl.jsp
4. Corner, James, and Alex MacLean, Taking Measures Across the American Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), xvi.

[Fake] Fake Estates exhibit installation, Ohio State University, 2006

January 2006

A Site Constructed: The Bonneville Salt Flats and the Land Speed Record, 1935-1970

Mickey Thompson emerging from Challenger I after a record-setting run on the flats, 1960.

A Site Constructed: The Bonneville Salt Flats and the Land Speed Record, 1935-1970
Landscape Journal vol. 24, no. 1, 2005.
Download the full article published in Landscape Journal
View a historical slideshow published in the journal PLACES

Introduction

From its modest folk beginnings in the late 1890s to the most recent attempts at over 760 mph (Black Rock Desert, NV, 1997), the chase for the land speed record has captured the public imagination. Unlike typical races, in which individuals compete against one another on a specific course, records are always understood to be temporary conditions- measures to be surpassed, in this case, often by the very same driver who had set the earlier mark. In this chase for time, perfection is an elusive (if not somewhat absurd) goal. While early record-setting vehicles were simply the most sophisticated in the automotive field at the time- sporting competing technologies like electrical, steam-powered, or combustion engines, and driven by the most competent drivers of the day-, such cars quickly proved insufficient given the growing ambitions of new drivers and engineers: beginning in the 1920s, new vehicles were being conceived specifically with the goal of breaking the land speed record, and quickly stopped looking like cars altogether. Borrowing from powerful propulsion technologies developed in aviation and rocket design (their shaping similarly inspired to the point of looking perhaps more like jet airplanes with their wings cropped off, lacking steering ability and traditional break systems), the "land" on which such vehicles would speed on rapidly became indeed a rather conceptual proposition.

With the desire for ever greater speeds came a need to find better terrains to test these vehicles. Speed runs require vast expanses of perfectly flat, unobstructed space- literally stretches of land several miles in both length and width to accommodate for the vehicle’s acceleration, deceleration, and potential deviation off course which, at such speeds, could be fatal. The Bonneville Salt Flats in Western Utah reflect the golden age of the chase for the land speed record. With its perfectly flat elevation across distances so great that the curvature of the earth becomes visible to the naked eye, the flats constitute a benchmark of sorts in speed racing, and for 35 years attracted the best drivers and their crews to compete there. Bonneville saw the speed record being broken no less than 18 times between 1935 and 1970, with final speeds literally doubling the initial record of 301 mph set there by Sir Malcolm Campbell in 1935. This project argues that the program of racing is in fact a sort of idealization of the site and its particular resources, and that consequently the activities of racing and the events of record-setting are in fact entirely connected to a greater sense of the landscape in both space and time. It is through racing on the site that is revealed an exceptional record of human activity.

Locating the site
Site map of Bonneville Salt Flats and environs

Aerial photograph of the Flats during Speedweek, one of several weeklong, annual racing contests held on the site in late summer.

A record-setting run
Don Vesco, aboard Turbinator, setting the (still unbeaten) wheel-driven land speed record of 458 mph on the flats in 2001. Vesco's top speed was clocked at 470 mph, but the official record is an average of the driver's speed through the flying mile — the time it takes to cross a one-mile segment located midway through the track — in both directions, which must occur within one hour. This timing method favors sustained rather than peak speeds, which may last only a few seconds. [Video credit: Rick Vesco]

The race course
The diagonal line at the top represents the Bonneville Salt Flats race course (a-d), with the flying mile (b-c) at the center. Bisecting the map from left to right at the center is Interstate I-80. Bottom left are salt mining operations.

Infrastructures of Transition
The notion of racing on the flats for the land speed record over the past 75 years in fact greatly intensifies a series of narratives of passage and transition which have played a key role in constructing the identity of the region. Over the years, the landscape of Western Utah seems to have intensely resisted the accumulation of solid residues of meaningful, permanent forms of settlement. Indeed while many have indeed traveled across the flats, it seems most were headed someplace else. The graphic strategy for this drawing is to represent the site as a series of overlapping vectors, each highlighting a significant infrastructural narrative related to the site and its development.

Measuring the Performance of the Ground
This drawing explores a crucial moment in the racing history of the Bonneville Salt Flats. In this chart, a complete account of the land speed record since its inception is diagrammed: each single record is represented as a horizontal segment, which begins on the date it is set and ends on the date it is broken (this also coincides with the beginning of a new segment). With the arrival of jet propulsion cars in the early 1960s, we witness an important reconceptualization of the notion and role of the ground with respect to speed: propulsion is now achieved by establishing friction with the air surrounding the car, instead of (more traditionally) with the ground below the vehicle. Tires still carry the vehicle across the flats, but their role is merely to transfer the weight of the car rather than distributing energy to the ground. Indeed, much about the land racing cars of the 1960s literally suggests airplanes with their wings cropped off. In the diagram we notice the sharp increase in the land speed record that coincides with the arrival of jet propulsion cars: this moment is marked in the chart as a split into 2 different vectors--the one with the lower inclination representing speed records for wheel-driven vehicles which has leveled off significantly in the last 40 years. Purists have stated that the land speed record should be limited to wheel-driven vehicles because they employ the ground as its means of traction. In this regard, the diagram seems to suggest that there might be a limit to speeds being achieved by land after all. This limit is represented as a wide blue horizontal band, 100 miles an hour thick, within which it is reasonable to expect that the wheel-driven record will remain for some time.

Ground: Surface, Traces, Index
This drawing explores the nature of this conceptually pure “white” ground surface and its capacity to register the activities that take place upon it. The traces that remain form a virtual index of the activities that have taken place there: paint marks delineating the various pit areas, deep holes marking the presence of a temporary structure (tent or other), skid marks, the boundaries of the course itself--all these litter this “white” surface as remains of former occupations. Photographs of these residual traces are assembled to form a larger representation of the ground. This surface is bisected by a fragment of a USGS map of the site. These two levels of scale of photography of the site (one a few feet above the salt surface, the other several thousand above it) are assembled, and various seams are thickened with additional levels of information regarding the racing procedures surrounding the land speed record.

Edges and Contours
It is ironic that measures of land speed on the flats are timed to the thousandth of a second in a landscape that has literally remained physically unchanged in the last 10,000 years. The mountains in the background serve as an index of the various water levels of Lake Bonneville over the site—an ancient lake formed 32,000 years ago that used to include the Great Salt Lake and an area 12 times its size. How could such precision emerge out of such timelessness?

Each year in late fall and winter, like clockwork, the flats are naturally flooded with winter rains and melting snow water from surrounding mountains. This natural process, aided by a 5 year, 6 million ton “salt laydown” campaign led by the BLM and largely financed by local mining concerns, helps rejuvenate the salt surface—cleansing it, as it were, of former occupations. While the water makes it impossible to permanently erect anything on the site, it also ensures, upon complete evaporation (a process that requires several months), the hard and smooth surface prized by racers. The period in the summer between the natural evaporation of water on the flats and its flooding later in the year marks the beginning and end of the annual racing season.

March 2005

The Site as Project

Robert Smithson, Mono Lake Non-Site (Cinders Near Black Point), 1968

The Site as Project
Journal of Architectural Education, vol. 57 no 3 (2004), pp.54-61.
Download a pdf of the full article

Introduction

It seems inevitable that we should leave behind the nostalgic notions of a site being essentially bound to the physical and empirical realities of a place...1

Within architectural thought and process, the site is traditionally thought of as a physical location, a piece of ground that is bound to the earth and subject to its physical laws. Site is also commonly conceived as a location for an intervention; a neutral or unfinished lot to be completed by an architectural project. Site and project are often thought to be distinct, one making way for the other.

Work performed in the context of Land and Conceptual Art provides a unique challenge to these assumptions. There the site and the project have been understood as interwoven in the production of art. For many of these artists, site is integral to the activities of reflection (design) and making (production). The location of the work is often established by the artist and the material qualities often emerge from a manipulation of found conditions as much as from new construction. In such projects, the site not only invites artistic activity but often constitutes its constructive result: “one does not impose, but rather expose the site...”2 Within architecture, then, the notion of site might be similarly broadened by thinking of it as a fundamental part of the design and building process. To conceive the site as constructed is to challenge its given, immutable qualities. It is to enter into a contentious territory of creation, one that is vulnerable to new and exciting interpretations.

What follows is a discussion of Land and Conceptual Art projects that suggests a reconsideration of the relationship between site and project within architecture. To do so, three key concepts central to the way we understand the site will be challenged: the role that imagination, location, and time play in constructing the site.

1. Constructing the Site: Imagination

There are latent assumptions to be challenged. For example, the persistent consideration of site as existing solely at or above the surface of the earth…3

In her seminal article "On Site: Architectural Preoccupations", Carol Burns proposes the notion of the cleared site to describe the traditional thinking about architectural sites -- that the site is no more than that which awaits architectural intervention -- something empty or cleared of content either physically or intellectually. She shows this concept to be simultaneously pervasive and destructive, suggesting that the cleared site is really no more than a formal strategy -- an unhelpful habit of architectural thinking.4 For her, a more fruitful direction lies in the recognition that all sites are constructions, whether out of a set of empirical conditions, the imagination, or both. The site is never simply found, but instead always constitutes an act of making.5

Robert Smithson and the dialectic of site and nonsite

Perhaps there are always 2 landscapes: one which we physically perceive and one which we mentally construct. We could say, perhaps, that the successful earthworks are those which generate a presence at both levels.6

Robert Smithson’s Nonsites provide a challenge to the traditional notion of site described by Burns. For him, the site was never simply a repository of features ripe for intervention, but served as the artistic project in itself -- the site as project. Located in a gallery or museum, each "nonsite" is an installation intended to represent, through a number of constituent parts (maps, extracted soil samples contained in manufactured bins, photographs, written narratives), an actual site located outside the gallery and visited by the artist. For Smithson, the role of the imagination is not to complete or build upon a suggestive canvas provided by the site, but rather to point out the gap that exists between the unprocessed, found reality of the land and its appropriation in ways that provide specific interpretations of the site. The artist described this process as a “Dialectic between Site and Nonsite”, a process that directly engages both the empirical and the imagined, the sight and the non-sight.7

The artifacts or parts that form the nonsite, taken individually, yield a series of distinct operations that define the site as constructed: the rocks indicate collecting and displacing; the bins frame or establish boundaries; the photographs suggest walking or moving about the site; the maps indicate location, and so on. While the sum of these artifacts resists definition as a single, cohesive whole or site, the land that has been transposed into the gallery reclaims above all else the status of the neutral piece of ground that we come to associate with the traditional open site awaiting intervention:

The site, in a sense, is the physical, raw reality -- the earth or the ground that we are not really aware of when we are in an interior room or studio or something like that -- and so I decided that I would set limits in terms of this dialogue [...] and as a result I went and instead of putting something on the landscape I decided it would be interesting to transfer the land indoors, to the nonsite, which is an abstract container.8

However, it is the displacement of earth from the actual site to the gallery nonsite that produces the shift in awareness between found and constructed ideals of site desired by Smithson. In Mono Lake Non-Site, the samples of earth extracted from the site and the map are purposely displayed differently. The samples sit on the floor of the gallery and are presented perspectivally to the viewer while the map, hung on the wall at eye level, appears in orthographic projection as an undistorted image. Thus the same site is presented two ways -- one concerned with the experience of sight, the other with an intellectualization or rationalization of the land. A full reconciliation of the actual site is possible only in the mind. The sites of each nonsite are firmly rooted in the mind not as a single picture, but as a rich set of representations open to the viewer’s scrutiny. In the outside world, however, the passage of the artist has left no physical traces.9 Visits to the site are possible, but Smithson offers that “once you get there you’re on your own”.10 The repercussions of this idea are profound: while we traditionally expect the site to be that place which awaits intervention, for Smithson “the site is where a piece should be but isn’t.”11

Ultimately, the Nonsites suggest that what we have come to understand as the site for work might be little more than the set of ideas we have about that site. The lesson is then twofold. First, what is empirically present is never enough to serve as a site. Second, a site is also never only the set of ideas about a place or its representations, but is always submerged within the dialectic of both ideas and concrete experience.

Richard Long, A Walk By All Roads and Lanes Touching or Crossing an Imaginary Circle, Somerset, England, 1977

Smithson's cryptic statement that "the site is where a piece should be but isn't" suggests yet a deeper reading of site that we have not yet considered. Like a palimpsest, any actual site could be seen as a specific set of locations, a variety of narratives, and therefore suggests many possibilities for action. But it is also possible to conceive, based on Smithson's work and statement, that the site might be nothing more than the structure of one's experience. In this he prefigures the work of Richard Long. Within much of his work, the site is conceived not as a clearly delineated place, but as a structure for experience in the form of a process (to walk in a straight line) or map (to walk in the landscape the radius of a circle as drawn on a map).

Five Walks
A walk of 30 miles
A walk passing 30 farmhouses (24 miles)
A walk crossing 30 crossroads (34 miles)
A walk seeing 30 blackbirds (29 miles)
A walk lasting 30 hours (96 miles)

Richard Long, Six Days and One Night in England, 1993

Considering the work shown above, Long lays out a set of conditions (miles, farmhouses, crossroads, blackbirds, and time) that provide a structure to a site without describing a specific site at all; it is the rigidity of the established itinerary (or project) that leads to a concrete experience of the landscape. This produces a kind of reversal in which it is the project that is given and where the site becomes the object of creative speculation. In the example above, the site is the site formed by the project, a walk that passes 30 farmhouses, or a walk seeing 30 blackbirds.

Long's trajectories through the landscape also suggest new ways in which we might reconsider our own initial visits to a new site: for the architect, such trajectories or visits typically include a careful measuring of the land, taking account of its critical features, and the like. What becomes possible are site investigations that might reveal the qualities of a site that would otherwise remain latent with the use of conventional surveying procedures.

The work of Long and Smithson suggests the importance of the imagination in enabling more diverse and richer concrete experiences of the land. Smithson helps architects to consider the richness of a site outside of its physical properties and features by establishing the importance of ideas and the imagination in site definition. Long and Smithson together suggest that it may be enriching to think of a site as the structure of action that conditions our experience of any environment. With both, we are confronted with the idea that sites can exist in the mind's eye before they are established as precise locations in the world.

2. Site and Location

The work of Long and Smithson calls into question the traditional assumption that a site is a location that precedes the project. Further, they question the idea of a site as belonging only to the realm of the concrete, the known, and the quantifiable; i.e., conditions thought to be received by the architect and over which s/he has little or no control.12 In this they dislodge the assumed primacy of location in the definition of a site and place it alongside the site as a concept -- as a set of ideas and relationships in the mind. Similarly, others artists have extended this challenge to the relationship between project, location, and site by making site selection an integral part of the creative process. Examples include instances in which a project once formed is completed by a choice of site (as with Long), or in which the location of the site is established by selecting that place that most closely matches specific attributes of an imagined, ideal site.

Much of the distinctive power of the early Matta-Clark interventions like Bronx Floors (1972) were developed through the appropriate selection of the site. The artist had begun experimenting with the idea of extracting building wall and floor fragments during the renovations of his own loft and the restaurant “Food” in New York, which he co-owned. Recognizing the artistic potential to this kind of intervention, Matta-Clark later actively solicited city officials for the use of abandoned buildings as potential sites for more extensive projects of the same nature.13 As a case of the project preceding the site, Matta-Clark hoped to project the idea of abandonment primarily by reinforcing, through careful interventions of removal, the state and feeling of abandonment that was already a part of these buildings. Receiving no response, the artist forged ahead and completed the project without permission from the buildings’ owners, thus lending additional subversiveness to the project itself.

Gordon Matta-Clark, Bronx Floors, New York, 1972-1973

In a more linear fashion, James Turrell spent over six months searching for an ideal location for what would later become the site for Roden Crater. In his previous work on natural light, Turrell had begun experimenting with a series of Skyspaces -- small vertical chambers in which a large, single opening created in the roof allowed the viewer to experience the changing quality of the light in the sky. He began to envision an extinct volcano as the earthly site of a much larger Skyspace that would need to meet a number of spatial and phenomenological expectations.14 Thus, the crater project literally preceded or determined the selection of the site.15 Upon discovering the Roden Crater site near Flagstaff, Arizona, in 1974, Turrell went on to purchase not only the volcano itself but also large quantities of surrounding land. Thus he was able to control views from the top of the crater -- and in the process match the expansiveness of the sky above to the views he has carefully sculpted and constructed within. For Turrell, the true site of this project is not so much the volcano itself, but the territory of the sky.

The relationship between location and site is further brought in question through the notion of the margin. In this regard, sites are thought possible in places that we would not normally understand as sites or in places that cannot be located or appear on standard maps or registers. Our traditional assumptions of possible locations as a “site for something” are disrupted. In this regard, Matta-Clark's occupation of unoccupied buildings and Turrell's open sky site serve to suggest that sites can exist outside of traditional frameworks of reference.

Both margin and marginalization have been important themes behind works of Land Art. Smithson's early journeys to the industrial wastelands of New Jersey (the Nonsites, as well as the Monuments of Passaic travelogue) and later the Southwestern desert (Spiral Jetty) with Michael Heizer and others, indicates the importance of a search for increasingly marginalized sites. For Walter de Maria, "isolation is the essence of Land Art" because it severed connections to the art world and its institutions by seeking locations remote from major urban and cultural centers.16 Many felt that a greater degree of creative freedom was achieved in their work in this way. These projects invite speculation for both the potential for far-flung sites in architecture and the notion that access to these marginal places can constitute an integral part of the constructed experience of site.17

Gordon Matta-Clark, Fake Estates, detail ("Little Alley", Block 2497, Lot 42), Queens, 1973

Matta-Clark's Fake Estates serves as an intriguing example of margin used literally to refer to spaces left over within the urban environment. The project embraces conventions of mapping and surveying traditionally employed in establishing the location and the precise boundaries of the site. Fake Estates explores those particular moments in the process of subdividing property where such conventions produce a conceptual excess of surveying, as it were, thus fostering unexpected anomalies in the fabric of the city. Survey lines become so numerous that new, unintended parcels begin to appear.

The artist purchased fourteen parcels of residual land, deemed gutter space or curb property, from the cities of Queens and Staten Island that had been put on sale for $25 each: a 2.33’ x 355’ long strip of land, a 1.83’ x 1.11’ lot, among others.18 Many were literally inaccessible and landlocked between buildings or other properties. Of these, Matta-Clark remarked: “that's an interesting quality; something that can be owned but never experienced."19 The artist created an exhibit of his newly acquired properties by assembling for each, and with deadpan accuracy, a photographic inventory of the site, its exact dimensions and location, as well as the deed to the property. For Matta-Clark, "the unusability of this land -- and the verification of space through the laws of property -- is [the] principal object of [his] critique."20 Thus the role of site in relation to unusual or unusable locations is rhetorical; they cannot receive a building within a traditional understanding of an architectural project. Fake Estates invites speculation as to the value and purpose of land and reveals the conceptual potential of real sites -- even small and unusable ones. It suggests an aggressive seeking of sites in unexpected locations, or simply in those places we assume do not have architectural potential.

The Fake Estates project also firmly established architecture as the site of Matta-Clark's creative work.21 Seen in a larger context, Fake Estates is part of an artistic tradition of projects within Conceptual Art concerned with neglected architectural environments that make up the urban and suburban fabric. In many of these projects, again, the site is first an object of the mind -- looking critically, as it were, at familiar conditions in the built environment. These works include the documentary surveys of Dan Graham (suburban housing), Ed Ruscha's studies of parking lots, gas stations, and apartment buildings in Los Angeles, Hans Haacke’s mapping of real estate holdings in Manhattan, the work of Robert Smithson, as well as the interventions of Matta-Clark, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Rachel Whiteread, and others. The implication for architects is an interesting reversal of assumptions in that the finished building (and not the site on which it resides) becomes the site for work. These projects constitute a reminder that most buildings and structures are often conceptually neglected over time and thus can serve as rich sites for future projects.

3. Site and Time: The Site as Process

There is a conceptual elegance to the idea that a site can be a project in itself. One can design with this sense of time and change in mind, rather than follow the logic of the term project that in architecture suggests a more arrested state of things.

The building surveys and interventions of Christo and Jeanne Claude, Matta-Clark, and others are cases in which built structures are themselves later critically reinvested as sites. Architectural sites traditionally refer to that interval of time in which a project is conceived (the project site) and built (construction site). Before this period of reflection in which the architect is involved intellectually with the site, the location exists merely as a place of unfocused attention -- a place that doesn't command any specific meaning attached to architecture and building. Upon completion, both project and site are subsumed within a new term that often designates purpose or use such as home or office. Here it might be said then that site is a transitory expression -- a generic and often abstract placeholder until a more permanent form of inhabitation is manifested. The use of buildings as sites in Conceptual Art engages a mutual process of dis-placement, rather than simply in an act of re-placement. Carol Burns writes:

Architecture is not constituted of buildings or sites but arises from the studied relationship of the two and from an awareness that site is received as an architectural construct.22

Walter de Maria, Lightning Field, Quemado, New Mexico, 1977

Walter de Maria's Lightning Field, a gridded field of thin stainless steel poles set into the high plains of New Mexico, can best be understood as more of a site than a project. To be sure, it is a finished installation of materials on a site, but one that is only completed fully when lightning strikes. Even then its completeness lasts only for an instant. On days when no storms are in sight, the shiny metal finish and the positioning of the poles provide a site in anticipation of the lightning. The poles also seem to disappear and reappear as the light changes across the site. Lightning Field is an unfinished work that is completed over and over again by its engagement with the forces and patterns for which it was designed. For architecture it suggests the possibility that completed projects be seen as open-ended projects that seek to work with an ever-changing set of conditions. It proposes a design approach to intervene minimally, where needed, and in reference to what is already there. It invites the designer to recognize the potential of a site and tease out its qualities without overpowering them.

To rethink site and project is also to conceive the site as a process. For Richard Long, "a walk is just one more layer, a mark, laid upon the thousands of other layers of human and geographic history to the surface of the land."23 Understood in this way, a site is something of a repository of its own history, some of which can be found physically embedded within the site, while much else resides more ephemerally in the human history of it. It is a repository that is forever in the process of change.

Michael Heizer, Double Negative, Mormon Mesa, Overton, Nevada, 1969-1970

Smithson's work is deeply influenced by a sense of time beyond recent occupations and narratives, and in a site's geological time line that far precedes and will likely far exceed its human occupation.24 It is a perspective that provides him a sense of immediacy, indeterminacy, and insignificance in the sense that his works are always works in process. Similarly, for many land artists, the notion of time and its actions on the site is understood as a creative shaping force. Michael Heizer and Dennis Oppenheim have acknowledged the powerful role that time plays in transforming their work, even to the point of eventual disappearance.25

Given this extended context set by Smithson and Long, a walk, like the most lasting buildings or landscapes, all constitute events that occupy relatively short increments of time in the history of a site. The site remains a construction without a single author.26 The role of architecture may not be to establish permanence but rather to acknowledge a certain richness of experience on the site. To operate in this way is to accept the inevitability of change. Future events are fused with the history of the site through the imagination as a substitute for direct experience. In recent large scale landscape architecture competitions such as those of Downsview Park in Toronto, and Fresh Kills on Staten Island in New York, the capacity of the site to adapt and transform over extended periods of time was as a primary conceptual determinant of each project.27 The architect or landscape architect constructs the site as infrastructure in ways that can later be altered by others and that comes to fruition over time.

Relatedly, Kenneth Frampton has encouraged architects to "cultivate the site" through design and construction in such a way as to uncover dormant narratives and strategies.28 Taking the point further, Miwon Kwon challenges that site specific strategies can be reactive of existing site conditions and thereby "generative of [new] identities and histories."29 With both, the site is being re-thought more in terms of process; less as a physical place, and more as the site of past events and potential futures rendered architecturally.

A consideration of time suggests an impoverishment in the way we understand sites in relation to projects. When sites are considered to be something more than a location awaiting a project, we are confronted more clearly with the quality of open-endedness and incompleteness that accompanies any completed project. It suggests a sense of humility and the need to design with change in mind in a way that can actively accommodate future growth. Lastly, it clarifies the point that places are formed over time and in time a site is a process. In a sense, we are all working like Matta-Clark who approached his later commissions with the full knowledge that the buildings he had been granted access to were scheduled to be demolished. Places are formed over time; they are a part of a process.

Conclusion: Constructing New Paradigms of Site

The works considered here are, quite literally, site projects -- projects concerned specifically with the issue of constructing or marking site. They offer provocative ways to re-think the role of the site in architecture. By folding the concept of site into the concept of project -- by making the site either a part of or the object of the project -- new associations between these terms emerge. When site and project are construed as elements of a dialectic, we are freed to re-examine and/or re-energize the relationship one shares with the other. For Michael Heizer, "the work is not put in a place, it is that place."30 Along similar lines, landscape historian Marc Treib proposed the phrase “inflected landscapes” as a way to think of art, architecture, and landscape projects that, like Heizer's, share a formally and conceptually blurred relationship to their site.31 For Treib the process through which the landscape is inflected is an act of transforming the site rather than one of new construction. In terms of site specificity one might argue that what indeed lacks specificity is neither the site nor the project, but rather the relationship between the two.

To challenge these traditional presumptions is to summon in our imagination new realms of opportunity for architecture: more than an empty lot awaiting building, the site is a prospect for intervention -- ephemeral or permanent, fixed or mobile, received or chosen, marginal or central, physical or virtual, real or fake. Within these conceptions of the site there is a potential richness for architectural design. To conceive of the site as being a part of architecture is to more fully take charge of the formulation of architectural interventions, and to take initiative in actively shaping the built environment.
To suggest that the site is the project does not question the primacy of site in architecture. Rather, to construct the site is simultaneously to recognize the immutability of the site/project relationship and raise the possibility of expanding this relationship. Within this framework, the site remains the foundation upon which any project established, but it is this very foundation that becomes the subject of critical inquiry.

Notes
1. Miwon Kwon, “One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity”, October 80 (1997): 108.
2. Robert Smithson, “Toward the Development of an Air Terminal Site”, Artforum 6/10 (1967). Reprinted in Nancy Holt, ed., The Writings of Robert Smithson (New York: New York University Press, 1979), p.47.
3. Carol J. Burns, "On Site: Architectural Preoccupations," in Andrea Kahn, ed., Drawing, Building, Text: Essays in Architectural Theory (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1991), p. 165.
4. Ibid, pp. 149, 155.
5. Further, such designations as "this is the project site" construct or frame the site in terms of specific relationships to other known places ("the site is near your house"), accepted systems of measure and orientation ("the site is located at the corner of Allen Street and Victoria Place"), intentions ("this is the site where we are planning to build"), or events ("the site for your project is also where my bicycle was stolen last year").
6. Marc Treib, "Traces Upon the Land: The Formalistic Landscape", in Architectural Association Quarterly 4 (1979): 37.
7. Robert Smithson, “The Spiral Jetty”, in Gyorgy Kepes, ed., Arts of the Environment (New York: G. Braziller, 1972). Reprinted in Holt, The Writings of Robert Smithson, p.115.
8. Robert Smithson, “The Symposium”, in Earth (Ithaca: Andrew Dickson White Museum, 1970). Reprinted in Holt, ed., The Writings of Robert Smithson, p.160.
9. Dennis Wheeler, “Four Conversations between Dennis Wheeler and Robert Smithson”, in Eugenie Tsai, ed., Robert Smithson Unearthed- Drawings, Collages, Writings (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp.112-113.
10. Ibid, p. 112.
11. Liza Bear and Willoughby Sharp, “Discussions with Heizer, Oppenheim, Smithson”, Avalanche 1/1 (1970). Reprinted in Holt, ed., The Writings of Robert Smithson, p.177.
12. The idea that the site is received is discussed in Burns, “On Site: Architectural Preoccupations”, p.149.
13. Pamela Lee, Object to Be Destroyed -- The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), pp. 72-73.
14. In addition to experiencing light from the sun, the moon, and the stars, Turrell was interested in celestial vaulting, a phenomenon that aviators experience at high altitudes where the concavity of the sky appears to be inverted.
15. Peter Noever, ed., James Turrell -- The Other Horizon (Ostfildern-Ruit: HatjeCantz, 2001), p.12.
16. Gilles Tiberghien, Land Art (New York: Princeton architectural Press: 1995), p. 104.
17. In the case of many earthworks there are no road signs or readily-available directions and the projects do not appear on most road maps, thus making access difficult and the location seem even more remote. The idea is pushed to extremes in Walter de Maria’s Lightning Field and James Turrell’s Roden Crater (once completed) in which the potential viewer must relinquish all control in accessing the works: the visitor is picked up, driven to, and dropped off at the site for extended periods of time (one or several days), during which one is literally confined there.
18. Jeffrey Kastner, “Land Acquisition 2: Queens County, New York”, Cabinet 10 (2003): 106. The exact dimensions of each parcel are provided.
19. Dan Carlinsky, “Silver Buyers Have a Field Day at City Sales”, New York Times, 14 October 1973, Real Estate sec., pp. 1, 12. Reprinted in Lee, Object to be Destroyed, p.103.
20. Lee, Object to be Destroyed, p.104.
21. Matta-Clark was part of the short-lived “Anarchitecture” group (1973), a loose association of New York City artists interested in architecture.
22. Burns, "On Site: Architectural Preoccupations," p.147.
23. Lucy Lippard, Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983). Reprinted in Tiberghien, p.102.
24. Liza Bear and Willoughby Sharp, “Discussions with Heizer, Oppenheim, Smithson”, Avalanche 1/1 (1970). Reprinted in Holt, The Writings of Robert Smithson, p.175.
25. Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and Partially Buried Woodshed come to mind, as do Dennis Oppenheim’s Ice Cuts and Michael Heizer’s desert excavations like Double Negative.
26. Burns, “On Site: Architectural Preoccupations”, p.164.
27. For a discussion of the Downsview Park competition, see Julia Czerniak, ed., Case: Downsview Park Toronto (Munich: London: Prestel, 2001). For a discussion of the Fresh Kills competition, see Amanda Reeser and Ashley Schafer, eds., Praxis 4: Landscapes (New York: Praxis Inc., 2002).
28. Kenneth Frampton, “Toward a Critical Regional Regionalism”, in Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic (Port Townshend, Washington: Bay Press, 1983). Reprinted in Miwon Kwon, “One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity”, p.108.
29. Kwon, “One Place After Another”, p.108.
30. Liza Bear and Willoughby Sharp, “Discussions with Heizer, Oppenheim, Smithson”, Avalanche 1/1 (1970). Reprinted in Holt, The Writings of Robert Smithson, p.171.
31. Marc Treib, “Inflected Landscapes”, in Places 1/2 (1984): 66-77.

January 2005

Matter Displaced, Organized, Flattened: Recording the Landscape

Field specimens gathered in individual plastic bags for Gilles Clément's Le Lustre installation at the Canadian Center for Architecture, 2006

Matter Displaced, Organized, Flattened: Recording the Landscape.
Landscript 5: Material Culture (Berlin: Jovis Verlag, 2017), Jane Hutton ed.
Download a pdf of the the full article.

Introduction

Just as the right tools facilitate design, a well-considered kit helps us to comfortably move through and work in the landscape. Our rucksacks include clothing for different environmental conditions, water, food, navigational devices (mobile phone, mirror), protection (first-aid kit, sun cream, sunglasses) and professional tools (camera, tripod, sketchbook, pencils, plant press, sample bags, geological hammer, etc.).1
Günther Vogt

Access to varied and powerful sources of geographic data affects the ways in which designers engage sites for speculation. Information that, twenty years ago, would have taken days or even weeks to acquire at great cost, can now be accessed by just about anyone in mere seconds and often for free with the simple click of a mouse. The accessibility of sources like GIS, Google Maps, Google Street View, online USGS state clearing houses, and even crowd-sourced photography act as both a blessing and a curse: while providing important facts about the site, this information is acquired passively—that is, without direct input from the designer and without the broad set of tools described by landscape architect and educator Günther Vogt. Christophe Girot, observing that “a designer seldom belongs to the place in which he or she is asked to intervene” and fearing that “the introduction to a site project has all too often been reduced to systematic and quantitative formulas for analyzing the site from a distance,” asks, “How can outside designers acquire the understanding of a place that will enable them to act wisely and knowledgeably?”2

I would like to suggest that the direct experience, collection, organization, and display of site materiality has the potential to connect designers in meaningful and often unexpected ways with their sites that passively acquired data cannot. This is hardly a romantic proposition: I am not suggesting that the designer, simply by wandering about the site barefoot, might suddenly and magically glean new insight into the place of work. Site materiality is subject to a broad range of indexes and descriptors, from the rigorous metrics of scientific analysis—identification of vegetation genus, chemical composition of soils, airborne or ground contaminants—to those fuzzier qualities that Jane Bennett, author of Vibrant Matter, characterizes as “impressive, dynamic, incalculable, awesome and awful.”3 For Bennett, the use of the word “incalculable” does not suggest that these qualities are imprecise, subjective, or even of secondary importance, but that they are subject to a different kind of precision for which fewer tools and recording techniques exist. In landscape architecture, where printed (two-dimensional) forms of representation constitute the standard of exploration and communication, Bennett’s call to harness the vibrancy of physical matter is provocative. Can or should these approaches be codified into methodologies applicable to a broad range of sites? What are its implications for design?

Taking cues both from within and outside the discipline, I highlight a range of approaches to recording materiality in landscape fieldwork. These include not only the work of established practitioners like Gilles Clément, Günther Vogt, and SCAPE, but also the work of artists like Robert Smithson, Stan Brakhage, Candy Jernigan, and herman de vries. Three key issues are identified with respect to methodology: the displacement of matter from the site to the studio workspace; the organization of this matter; and, finally, techniques for situating matter within the conventional two-dimensional space of landscape representation. I argue that often the very same standards that drive design exploration—curiosity, experimentation, craft, and rigor—constitute the key ingredients for approaching site research and analysis.

The consequences of this type of approach are potentially far-ranging: designers who actively explore the site and construct new frameworks for engaging with the site are less prone to resorting to formulaic responses to passively received data. I am not suggesting that designers do away with that type of information altogether, but that this data needs to be approached critically so that we do not lose unscripted, often meaningful, encounters with the site. By looking both within and outside the field of practice for new references, by considering what on the surface might appear to be simple, pragmatic questions regarding fieldwork methods, I hope to open up new ways of approaching this exciting topic. Collecting, organizing, and displaying site matter are not precursors to landscape design investigations, but an integral part of the process of design speculation itself.

Matter, displaced

Perhaps there are always 2 landscapes: one which we physically perceive and one which we mentally construct.4
Robert Smithson

In design professions, the term “site” denotes a transient condition: the precise interval of time during which a work is first conceived (at which point it is referred to as the project site) and later built (the construction site). Once completed, the work performed may take on a more permanent designation—a field, a park, a garden—at which point it often ceases being known as a site altogether. Before this crucial period, however, the very same location exists merely as a place of unfocused attention because it has yet to command any specific meaning that is the result of design speculation. Christophe Girot’s use of the aviation term “landing” describes “the specific moment when a designer still does not know anything about a place and yet is prepared to embark on a lengthy process of discovery” and suggests touching down into a new realm, a new world.5 For him, landing marks “the beginning of the odyssey of the project.”6

A site is, therefore, less a real place and more of a designation, an intellectual construct. Ever the imaginative craftsman with regard to words and language, the artist Robert Smithson (1938–1973) coined the term “Nonsite” to characterize the limits of the process by which the site emerges as “a landscape which we mentally construct.” Although not commonly employed by design professionals, the term “Nonsite” may be useful to characterize the simulacrum of documentary evidence—samples, maps, photos, etc.—present in the studio at the moment of conceptualization of the project.7 Smithson points to the gap, familiar to designers, that exists between the unprocessed, found reality of the land and its translation as a project site, and so reminds us that this material is, quite literally, not-the-site, that place “which we physically perceive” or experience.

Robert Smithson, Non-Site: Line of Wreckage (Bayonne, New Jersey), 1968

Located in a gallery or museum, each of Smithson’s Nonsites was an installation intended to represent, through a number of constituent parts—maps, extracted ground samples contained in manufactured steel bins, photographs, written narratives—an actual site located outside the gallery and visited by the artist. The title of each work bears its geographic location: A Nonsite (The Palisades); A Nonsite, Pine Barrens, New Jersey; Non-Site: Line of Wreckage (Bayonne, New Jersey); Mono Lake Non-Site (Cinders Near Black Point), among others. For Smithson, the goal of these installations was to point out the gap that exists between the unprocessed, found reality of the land and its appropriation in ways that provide specific interpretations of the site. The artist described this condition as a “Dialectic between Site and Nonsite,” a process that directly engages both the empirical and the imagined, the sight and the non-sight.8

Taken individually, the artifacts that form each Nonsite evoke a series of distinct operations that define the site as actively constructed: the rocks indicate collecting and displacing of matter; the bins frame or establish boundaries; the photographs suggest walking or moving about the site; the maps establish location, and so on. While the sum of these artifacts resists definition as a single, cohesive whole or site, the land that has been transposed into the gallery reclaims above all else the status of the neutral piece of ground that we come to associate with the traditional open site awaiting intervention:

The site, in a sense, is the physical, raw reality—the earth or the ground that we are not really aware of when we are in an interior room or studio or something like that—and so I decided that I would set limits in terms of this dialogue … and as a result I went and instead of putting something on the landscape I decided it would be interesting to transfer the land indoors, to the nonsite, which is an abstract container.9

Robert Smithson, Mono Lake Non-Site (Cinders Near Black Point), 1968

This displacement of earth from the actual site to the (gallery) nonsite produces the shift in awareness between found and constructed ideals of site that was desired by Smithson. Like many of his peers during this period, the artist is posing a number of important questions about the fundamental nature of the art object: is it enough to place a common ground sample in a museum or gallery for it to acquire a new status as an artwork? How can ground, a spatially extensive term that knows no boundaries, be turned into an object? For Smithson, answers to these questions are often less than straightforward: in Mono Lake Non-Site, for example, samples of earth extracted from the site and a map describing the same site are purposely displayed differently. The samples sit on the floor of the gallery and are presented perspectivally to the viewer while the map, hung on the wall at eye level, appears in orthographic projection as an undistorted image. Thus the same site is presented two ways—one (the ground samples) concerned with the experience of sight, the other (map) with an intellectualization or rationalization of the land. A full reconciliation of the actual site is possible only in the mind. The sites of each nonsite are firmly rooted in the mind not as a single picture, but as a rich set of representations open to the viewer’s scrutiny.

VOGT, Bremen European Harbourproject studio, 2007

Smithson’s meticulous installation inside a gallery or museum recalls the care with which designers display fieldwork and sketches in their work studio. The arrangement of this information often becomes part of the spatial continuum of the office on a semipermanent basis during the conceptualization and execution of the project. A peek into Günther Vogt’s office helps illustrate this idea: the firm is renowned for its immersive fieldwork and site expeditions, which often last several days at a time. During this period, sketches and diagrams, photographs, rubbings, soil and rock samples, plant pressings, bark castings, and the like are produced, collected, and later displayed in the studio. Within the workspace lies a dedicated area of such intricate complexity that it cannot easily be taken down or moved at will. Indeed, what Vogt refers to as the Bremen European Harbour project studio, for example, might as well be known as the Bremen Harbour Nonsite: along one wall of the space, a multilevel shelving system helps the design team organize collected field materials, samples (pavers, grouts, etc.), while in the background a vertical wall display is set up to help organize photos, maps, and historical documentation. At the center of the room sit large design models of the project—another hallmark of the firm’s work. While Smithson purposely left the dialectic of site and nonsite open to personal interpretation, Vogt’s studio setup deliberately connects the site analysis with a concrete design response.

Vogt shares Smithson’s deep interest in the ground as both physical and conceptual matter: in the case of Basel’s Novartis Campus Park , the vertically eroded edges lining the depressed walkways suggest the alluvial sedimentation caused by the movement of the Rhine River and its tributaries around the city. Also of note is the great care dedicated by the design team to the representation of the ground in study models, as shown by the carefully cast plaster elements that form the ground plane of the model for the Novartis Campus Green , which emulate limestone pavement formations observed in the Glattalp, near Silberen.10 Similarly, a model for London’s Parliament Square proposal depicted the World Heritage Site “on top of 300 million years’ worth of sedimentation.”11 As such, the iconic buildings that form the upper crust of the thick study model seem to dissolve within the geological history of the site. This extraordinary model echoes architect Carol Burns’s call to rethink the conventional assumption that sites exist “solely at or above the surface of the earth.”12 This, in turn, greatly opens up inquiry of the site in both its depth and expanse.

Matter, organized

To reconstruct the diversity of the site in its totality would require not only an exhaustive inventory of the elements that can be equated with the site’s specific biodiversity, the number of plants and animal species that occupy the place, but also a census, a kind of ecological index to evidence human presence on the site, objects that speak of certain behaviors and practices. 13
Gilles Clément

Realized in 1968, Smithson’s Nonsites are grounded (literally) in the realm of minimalist art of the late nineteen-sixties. The gray steel containers that contain the rock matter evoke the work of Donald Judd and other contemporaries; the rocks, the accompanying black-and-white photographs, and the maps that complete each work’s monochromatic palette do little to elucidate the diversity of matter present on any site. Smithson’s written descriptions often prove enigmatic, as in the following description of the Spiral Jetty:

North by east—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water…
Northeast by North—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water…
Northeast by East—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water…
East by North—Mud, salt crystals, rocks, water… 14
Smithson’s work resonates strongly with French landscape architect Gilles Clément’s concept of Third Landscape. Clément coined the expression to characterize places—often-disaffected urban areas—that act as a “refuge for the earth’s biodiversity.”15 Like Smithson—who remarked of the Nonsites: “the site is where a piece should be but isn’t”—Clément asserts that the role of the landscape architect in such situations is not to transform or alter, but to stay out of the way, to observe, bear witness, to monitor and assess over an extended period of time the emergent richness within existing sites.16

Illicit photographs of Smithson defiantly trespassing fenced areas on his way to remote areas of the New Jersey landscape suggest that the performance—gaining access to / visiting sites, acquiring matter, hauling it back to the city—was an integral part of these works. These are, after all, non-sites: places not meant to be experienced by casual passers-by. Clément’s methods are far more transparent: Le Champ (1977) and La Vallée (1993) are tracts of land privately purchased by the designer to function as laboratories for testing and experimentation into the concept of third landscape.17 Clément continued this line of exploration with a series of awarded commissions, first around Lake Vassivière (2002), and later with Le Lustre, an installation at the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal (2006). It is here, around the museum’s formal grounds, sculpture garden, and adjacent expressway and onramps, that the landscape architect set about trying to constitute a rigorous material inventory, a “reservoir” or “time capsule” that testifies to the ecological diversity found within the site.18 Clément described the collection of found materials as “organic specimens and inorganic objects,” ranging from grasses, leaves, and insects, to found detritus like a tube of toothpaste, a cell phone cover, rusty nails, an empty coffee cup, etc.19

Gilles Clément, collected specimens and early study for Le Lustre, Canadian Center for Architecture, 2006

These last few discarded artifacts recall artist Candy Jernigan’s (1952–1991) single-minded inventory of drug paraphernalia collected around her lower Manhattan neighborhood during the mid nineteen-eighties. Her materials take on a strange power from being aggregated into a single artwork: how many different junkies unwittingly contributed to this project? Jernigan’s careful notations for Found Dope II (1986) establish the place and moment of collection of each item, suggesting a limited system of local users. Similarly, Clément’s broad physical array of natural and manufactured matter is part of the same ecosystem: "Each plant and animal—even just its trace in leaves, roots, pods, shells, carapaces, or skeletons—is connected to all the others, and thus to a behavioral system that has evolved over time. In the same way, each found object produced by human industry is connected with a habit of use, an ancient practice preceding its presence on the site, a use in fact connected with the site's very existence."20 And while this inventory could not express the true richness and diversity of the site, “it could represent the idea of it."21

Candy Jernigan, THE NEW YORK COLLECTIONS, Found Dope: Part II, 1986. Detail.

Clément’s title for the piece was deliberately chosen to embody irony and contradiction. The term lustre (chandelier) evokes the elaborate light fixtures adorning the ceilings of the most elegant dining rooms. Although it provides no illumination, Le Lustre does look like a chandelier to be sure, but a chandelier made from site debris. Furthermore, this matter may have seemed an ill fit within the rarefied, institutional confines of an important museum like the Canadian Center for Architecture. Clément cast over one hundred site samples into individual, teardrop-shaped vessels made of translucent acrylic, recalling a chandelier’s arrangement of carefully faceted glass drops. In so doing, the artifacts become permanently frozen, further removed from the deteriorative effects of time and atmospheric site conditions—museified, so to speak. Floating above the ground, their status is elevated both spatially and symbolically; matter once encountered underfoot is now experienced at eye level. Whereas the original collection could fit inside a medium size garbage bag, the samples now swell to become the center of attention of an entire room.

Gilles Clément, Le Lustre, Canadian Center for Architecture, 2006

For Clément, the internal arrangement of individual artifacts do not reflect any particular kind of hierarchy: all these samples are part of the same ecosystem. Showing little interest in prescribing the viewer’s experience and insights, Clément challenged those “who visit the site and the museum installation in the galleries to imagine possible scenarios for [the artifacts].”22 Smithson had similarly stated, “Between the site and the Nonsite one may lapse into places of little organization and no direction.”23 For Clément and Smithson, the role of the imagination is to bridge the gap between site and nonsite, between the museum and neglected spaces outside of it.

Gilles Clément, Étude pour le CIAP sur l'île de Vassivière, Vassivière en Limousin, 2003

As he did with Le Lustre, Clément deploys meticulously high standards of craft and design for the Vassivière Box. These two works are fascinating and highly unusual in the field of landscape architecture, because site analysis rarely leads to such highly polished, three-dimensional end products. The box Clément fashioned for Lake Vassivière is highly interactive: like the artworks of the American Joseph Cornell (1903–1972), it features an assortment of niches, drawers, and compartments designed to hold annotated maps, aerial photographs, slides, and organic matter. Roughly fifteen by fifteen inches in size when closed, the box hinges open and is as intimate as the Lustre is public. In both cases, Clément proposes a new framework through which site matter can be stored, organized, displayed—found anew. These installations challenge conventional wisdom by illustrating that creativity and craft are skills that can be deployed at any stage of development of the design process, including fieldwork, analysis, and research.

Matter, flattened

That is what I do when I collect—I like the original. I don’t want a photo.24
herman de vries

The works and practices discussed so far retain field matter’s original physical bulk. There also exist important historical precedents integrating physical site matter directly into conventional (flat, two-dimensional) systems of landscape representation. Perhaps the most popular among these is the practice of pressing botanical specimens—plants, leaves, flowers—between the pages of large albums, a practice that gained broad popularity during the Victorian era and remains a honored field technique today. Rubbing is another powerful analog technique that references the direct experience prized in fieldwork. Executed with charcoal or lead sticks, rubbings derive their name from the very act of rubbing a soft sketching medium on a thick sheet of paper laid directly over the surface to be documented. The result is a full-scale impression that highlights the relief present in the surface. Because it employs the observer’s own hands, the technique makes plain the labor of having personally visited the site, conveying a direct, sensory experience that more sophisticated field instruments and tools often cannot approximate. Practitioners like Vogt use the method to produce studies of tree bark; similarly, the architect Ben Nicholson created large rubbings of the terra cotta pavement patterns hidden beneath the floorboards of Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library reading room. However, the technique enjoys far broader popular use outside the visual and design arts, as witnessed, for example, in the hundreds of rubbings performed each day at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington DC

Dutch artist herman de vries25 and American experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage bring unique perspectives to these fieldwork methods. Less interested in the technique than in collecting the medium used to perform the rubbing itself, de vries conveys the immediacy of place by gently rubbing site soil samples directly onto paper. The color pigment of earthen matter is slowly worn down against the tooth of the paper to reveal subtle hues unique to each new site. In other words, de vries’ rubbings are drawings made of soil. On recent display at the Dutch pavilion for the 2015 Venice Art Biennale was an installation of eighty-four of these rubbings, executed on sheets of paper equal in size and laid out in a six by fourteen grid. The contrast between the almost white earth found on the island of La Gomera, Spain, and the greenish hues of North Cyprus is indicative of the range of colors found in the installation.

herman de vries, from earth: everywhere, 2014–2015. Dutch Pavilion, Venice Biennale.

These rubbings and de vries’ ongoing collection of 8,000 earth samples from around the world are stored in the remarkable Musée des Terres (Earth Museum). Held at Musée Gassendi, in Digne-les-Bains, France, this collection is a wonderful example of fieldwork and truly unique in its scope.

herman de vries, from earth, the earth museum. Musée Gassendi. Digne-les-Bains, France

Like de vries, the American filmmaker Stan Brakhage (1933–2003) was interested in using low-tech methods to convey an intuitive, primary experience of matter that transcends conventional identification. Brakhage’s restless sense of invention suggests a willingness to completely upend cinematic conventions of image, perspective and compositional logic, while at the same time working with the tools of the craft (projector, film strips, etc.).26 For The Garden of Earthly Delights (1981), Brakhage sandwiched ground matter collected around his Lump Gulch cabin near Boulder, Colorado, between two protective layers of 35mm film. He then printed the assemblage of leaves, blades of grass, seeds, and dead flowers so that the results—a single, flattened strip of film—could be shown through a movie projector. For Brakhage, film acts not only as a compositional and structural substrate, much like paper does in botanical albums of pressed specimens, but it also retains its properties as a time-based medium.

Stan Brakhage, The Garden of Earthly Delights, 1981. Detail frames.

Film scholar Scott McDonald writes that when projected at a rate of twenty-four frames per second, the 2,496 frames that make up the 156-foot long montage “seem to pile onto the retinas, creating evanescent collages.”27 Interestingly, the hours, weeks, and months that Brakhage spent carefully composing the site matter onto this one-inch wide surface are experienced cinematically in less than two minutes. This visceral encounter with the site is further magnified by the scale and orientation of the projection: though the film is silent, one can almost hear the cracking of the leaf matter underfoot, now floating on a vertical screen and at a radically enlarged scale. For McDonald, the viewer experiences “a flickering kaleidoscope” made from bits of seed, flowers, leaf matter in a broad range of colors.28 Though short in length, the film conveys the daily cycle of natural illumination, beginning in near darkness in the dawn of early morning, to the full light of the midday, and ending in the darkness that comes with dusk.

Stan Brakhage, The Garden of Earthly Delights, 1981

de vries’ and Brakhage’s fieldwork is remarkable for their rigor, their sense of craft, their sheer ambition (8,000 soil samples, nearly 2,500 film frames), and willingness to approach conventional media in new ways. Outside the sketchbook, such analog methods have few contemporary equivalents in the increasingly sophisticated digital graphics of contemporary landscape representation. The period of the mid-nineteen-nineties—before digital software like AutoCAD, Adobe Illustrator, and Photoshop became the professional standard—offers insight into the flattening of field matter in landscape representation. During this period, practitioners like James Corner fashioned new hybrid methods by combining traditional drafting with collage elements enhanced by carefully typeset annotations. For Corner and his contemporaries, the layering of such elements—USGS maps, photographs, etc.—produced a thick, “2.5-dimensional” construction: this is to say that these representations occupy a space between flat, two-dimensional representations and the fully three-dimensional space of analog models: they are not quite flat, but not quite thick either.29 In The Life of Water (circa 2001), landscape architect Kathy Poole explored the tectonic qualities of such layered arrangements; like Candy Jernigan, she thickened this 2.5-dimensional space of representation by adding layers of site materiality. Placed under protective covers of translucent vellum, delicate pH strips are fastened to single sheet of Strathmore, on which a reference map of the site is drawn. Annotations correlate the strips with the location of field tests. The thick arrangement of these three paper layers is sewn in place. Finally, a linear sequence of small vials containing water samples is hung in front of the paper elements. Like the Vassivière Box, the piece invites physical interaction. For Poole, the shadows cast by the vials onto the vellum, the pH strips, and the map, and the subtle lines and words traced by thread and drafting pencil, elegantly fuse into a thick, tectonic montage of site information.

Kathy Poole, The Life of Water, circa 2000. Detail.

Conclusion

When combined with traditional streams of documentation, the role of direct observation is to inject the site with the kind of curiosity and insight that are the hallmark of design exploration, combining into what Christophe Girot describes as the process of founding the site.30 Indeed, the designer should approach the exploration of the site not merely as a set of objective, passively received features—legal boundaries, dimensions, topography, vegetation, building locations, etc.—but also as an area shaped by ideas and perceptions that should be an integral part of the design process. Girot himself has championed time-based techniques of site exploration like short films, suggesting new ways for the designer / student to engage with the site as a place of work by integrating “into complex representations such volatile factors as immersion, the perception of atmospheres, the role of the sound, and our own activity in space that all together form the experience of large scale environments.”31

The current work performed by SCAPE on the Living Breakwaters project in Staten Island, NY stands as another strong illustrative argument for this kind of hybrid methodology. For principal Kate Orff, the project is unique in that it is “equal parts design strategy and community conversation.”32 Living Breakwaters brings together design professionals with nearby stakeholders by engaging them directly in the work. To be sure, the project employs cutting-edge technology—like the ADCIRC/SWAN storm surge and wave modeling system—but perhaps the most important insight comes from the direct encounter with oysters as a concrete form of site matter: shore tours, charrettes, and community events create opportunities for local residents to take on active roles in growing spat into the millions of oysters that will form the protective reefs along the southern shore of the island.33 These activities bring this diverse group of actors into direct contact with the work and frame their place within it as eventual stewards of the project.

The methods described in this article call into service a unique set of design skills: a deep curiosity, the capacity to design and conduct rigorous field experiments and organize its results, the ability to work synthetically, and a highly tuned sense of craft, to name only a few. The result is that the site, with its potential for transformation and change, is allowed to emerge in provocative and unexpected ways.

Robert Smithson, circa 1967

Notes

1. Günther Vogt, Distance and Engagement (Baden, Switzerland: Lars Müller Publishers, 2010), 372.
2. Christophe Girot, “Four Trace Concepts in Landscape Architecture,” in Reclaiming Landscape, ed. James Corner (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 60–65.
3. Klaus K. Loenhart, “Vibrant Matter, Zero Landscape: An Interview with Jane Bennett,” GAM magazine 07: Zero Landscape—Unfolding Active Agencies of Landscape (Graz: Graz University of Technology, 2011), 17.
4. Marc Treib, “Traces Upon the Land: The Formalistic Landscape,” in Architectural Association Quarterly 4 (1979): 37.
5. Christophe Girot, “Four Trace Concepts,” 61.
6. Ibid.
7. Elements of this discussion regarding Robert Smithson’s Nonsites first appeared in my article: “The Site as Project: Lessons from Land Art and Conceptual Art for Architecture,” Journal of Architectural Education 57:3 (2004), 54–61.
8. Robert Smithson, “The Spiral Jetty,” in Arts of the Environment, ed. György Kepes (New York: G. Braziller, 1972). Reprinted in Holt, The Writings of Robert Smithson, 115.
9. Dennis Wheeler, “Four Conversations between Dennis Wheeler and Robert Smithson,” in Robert Smithson Unearthed- Drawings, Collages, Writings, ed. Eugenie Tsai (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 112–113.
10. Günther Vogt, Distance and Engagement, 102.
11. Ibid., 414.
12. Carol J. Burns, “On Site: Architectural Preoccupations,” in Drawing, Building, Text: Essays in Architectural Theory, ed. Andrea Kahn (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1991), 165.
13. Gilles Clément, “The Chandelier,” in Gilles Clément Philippe Rahm: Environment—Approaches for Tomorrow, ed. Giovanna Borasi (Milan: Skira / Canadian Center for Architecture, 2006), 104.
14. Robert Smithson, “The Spiral Jetty,” in The Writings of Robert Smithson, ed. Nancy Holt (New York: New York University Press, 1979), 113.
15. Gilles Clément, “Working With (and never against) Nature,” in Gilles Clément Philippe Rahm: Environment—Approaches for Tomorrow, 92.
16. Liza Bear and Willoughby Sharp, “Discussions with Heizer, Oppenheim, Smithson,” Avalanche 1, no. 1 (1970). Reprinted in The Writings of Robert Smithson, 177.
17. Ibid., 94.
18. Clément, “Working With (and never against) Nature,” 92.
19. Clément, “The Chandelier,” 105.
20. Ibid., 104.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Robert Smithson, A Nonsite (The Palisades), 1968. Underline by Smithson.
24. “herman de vries interview in the dutch pavilion at the venice art biennale,” designboom, https://www.designboom.com/art/herman-de-vries-dutch-pavilion-venice-art-biennale-05-13-2015/ (accessed June 22, 2015).
25. Note that de vries insists on spelling of his name in lowercase.
26. Scott McDonald, The Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide to Independent Films About Place (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), 68.
27. Ibid., 71.
28. Ibid., 69–71.
29. Such juxtapositions remain in great use today by proponents like Anuradha Mathur and Dillip da Cunha, but the very real, material thickness of these early montages is now largely virtual.
30. Christophe Girot, “Four Trace Concepts,” 61–64.
31. “Landscape Video: video analysis and design tool,” Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, https://girot.arch.ethz.ch/research/digital-media-perception/landscape-video-research (accessed May 24, 2016).
32. Kate Orff/SCAPE, Towards an Urban Ecology (New York: Monacelli Press, 2016), 258.
33. Ibid., 242.

November 2017

Preparing the Ground: A Brief History of the Landscape Transect

Weimar Geographisches Institut, Höhenkarte (1866). Partial view. David Rumsey Maps.

Revista de Arquitectura no. 26, Fall 2024.
Download the published article

1. A Piece of Ground
The section is the site where space, form, and material intersect with human experience [...] 1
—David and Paul Lewis, Mark Tsurumaki, Manual of Section

From the greatest depths of the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean to the summit of Mount Everest (Chomolungma) in the Himalayan mountain range, the 65,000-foot interval along which the outer surface of the Earth is vertically articulated has been widely explored. While barely registering a blip at the planetary scale, traversing and documenting the most distinct landscapes and territories that stratify this range has long captured the human imagination, leading to extraordinary displays of endurance and courage, leaps of conceptual thinking, invention, and visual artistry.2 In 1802, for example, the German scientist Alexander von Humboldt nearly completed a full ascent of Chimborazo (20,548 ft above sea level) in Ecuador, then believed to be the tallest mountain on Earth, turning back as he neared the summit because his men bled “from the eyes, lips, and gums.”3 Working with the botanist Aimé Bonpland (1805), the painter Pierre-Antoine Marchais (1824), and key collaborators like the Colombian lawyer, engineer and naturalist Francisco Jose de Caldas, whom he did not readily acknowledge, Humboldt distilled the expedition’s findings into a single, comprehensive representation, which he referred to as a Tableau Physique: a vertically-exaggerated, annotated sectional profile of the mountain in which the expression of altitude is at once inwardly- and outwardly-focused, resulting in regions that are thickened by field observations (plants, temperatures, barometric pressure, etc.) while simultaneously situating the daunting peak with respect to key landmarks worldwide.4

Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland,Tableau physique des Andes et Pays voisins (1805). Partial view. © The Board of Trustees of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

While far more intimate in scope, the German painter and printmaker Albrecht Dürer’s Great Piece of Turf (1503)—a full-scale sectional representation of a footlong strip of soil produced three centuries earlier—is no less compelling. Dürer’s contemporaries Leonardo and Bramante had first conceived of the cutaway section as a means of correlating and representing architectural relationships that could not be gleaned from a single point of view. For the historians Jacques Guillerme and Hélène Vérin, it is “Thus [that] one became accustomed to considering side by side, as it were, simultaneously, the inside and outside of things, […] the sign and means of a rationality that analyzes and synthesizes, breaks down and reassembles...”5 Seeking to employ similar methods for visualizing conditions at and below the ground surface, Dürer had, for his part, relied on more direct means: he simply ripped a clumpy patch of soil—an amalgam of cock's-foot, creeping bent, daisy, dandelion, smooth meadow-grass, germander speedwell, greater plantain, hound's-tongue, and yarrow—from the ground, roots and all, later transporting the artifact to his Nuremberg workshop for closer inspection.6 Indeed everything about the watercolor, from Dürer’s careful framing to its very title, attempts to objectify the ground, in effect suggesting that any sectional representation is inherently confined—merely a piece of the larger world.

Albrecht Dürer, Great Piece of Turf (1503). Albertina Museum, Vienna.

2. Walking the Line
Walking [is] a primary act in the symbolic transformation of the territory.7
—Francisco, Careri, Walkscapes: Walking as Artistic Practice

The British artist Richard Long reminds us that if the properties of the landscape transect and architectural section are similarly probing, the scope of the former is significantly more open-ended. For architects, the extents of a building section are traditionally limited to the structure and its immediate surrounds; for their part, landscape architects typically operate within far more extensive site conditions for which such clear references or landmarks rarely exist. In A Ten Mile Walk (1968), Long, a sculptor for whom walking constitutes a creative and performative gesture, invites us to consider the landscape experience resulting from a single straight line drawn on a map that spans the distance between Clovenrocks Bridge and Cowley Wood, across the fields of the Challacombe Common in Exmoor, England.8 As is customary in his work, Long provides no further documentary evidence of the walk beyond the map upon which the itinerary was first laid out. By inviting us to visualize the walk in our own minds, the artist suspends us in an uncertain space: somewhere between Clovenrocks Bridge and Cowley Wood, between the flattened, aerial view of the land provided in the map and the irregular terrain it charts; we might even imagine ourselves trailing slightly behind the artist himself as he first walked across the Challacombe Common nearly 6 decades ago. For Long, the rigidity of the line, its clear origin, ending, bearing and length are conceived as a structure for experience and discovery that is as arbitrary as it is exacting and precise. The ease with which the artist would have traced the itinerary on the map of Exmoor—no doubt in a matter of seconds—results in a full-scale, spatial transect that is spatially embodied (rather than drawn) along each step of the walk, as Long carefully stakes out the route, compass in hand (we imagine), through thickets, over field walls, across ditches, roads, 1,100 feet of grade change and over the course of many hours.

Richard Long, A Ten Mile Walk (1968). Image courtesy of Konrad Fischer Gallery. © 2024 Richard Long. All Rights Reserved, DACS, London / ARS, NY.

For landscape architects, walking and documenting this type of route constitutes a time-honored method of field exploration and discovery. As he describes the panoply of gear assembled by members of his firm ahead of a 7-day, 2007 excursion across the 850-acre Hapsden Estate in England—an array that “include[s] clothing for different environmental conditions, water, food, navigational devices (mobile phone, mirror), protection (first-aid kit, sun cream, sunglasses) and professional tools (camera, tripod, sketchbook, pencils, plant press, sample bags, geological hammer, etc.),” the Swiss landscape architect and educator Günther Vogt provides a hint of just how rigorous and demanding such expeditions can be.9 In other words, plotting such an extensive geographical course also requires imagining, and rigorously preparing for, any eventuality far in advance of departure, for once the journey begins, it may be hard to turn back.

In Paradoxes of Green, the landscape educator Gareth Doherty ponders Long’s influence in preparing for exploratory fieldwork in and around the island country of Bahrain in the Persian Gulf. He notes that, at their very best, the benefits of such transects is precisely the fact that they are neither “intuitive” nor “necessarily legal.” 10 This is to say that the mere presence of a graphic line on a map no more authorizes its author to walk—let alone chart or render—the path it describes. And even if access had been sanctioned, Doherty notes that the fact that any of the linear routes that he had initially plotted over Bahrain intersected with “public, private, wasteland, agricultural land, private housing, schools, and cemeteries, many of which are criss-crossed [read: interrupted] by walls, roads, and paths” meant that he simply could not have done so in the same manner as Richard Long—which is to say, in one fell swoop.11 To this end, Doherty notes that the role of such transect routes may in fact be to invite new perspectives by challenging the spatial, political, and territorial integrity of the original map and the territory it describes. For him, it is precisely in combining insights from the elevated vantage point of an aerial photograph or street map with embodied forms of field reconnaissance such as photographs, sketches, profiles, interviews and casual encounters collected during walks through the city—methods Doherty refers to as horizontal and vertical forms of fieldwork, respectively—that “allows the opportunity for a ‘thicker’ reading of a landscape, and therefore [one for which the designer] is positioned to propose ‘thicker’ [design] solutions that might ultimately be more successful.”12

3. Linearity vs. Continuity
Perhaps there are always 2 landscapes: one which we physically perceive and one which we mentally construct. 13
—Robert Smithson

While many designers use the terms ‘section,’ ‘cross section,’ ‘cut,’ and ‘transect’ interchangeably, the latter may be most apt in characterizing the reconnaissance activities undertaken by landscape architects. Indeed, the etymology of the term ‘transect’ suggests both moving through (tran-) and cutting (sect, from the Latin secare, which means dividing by cutting). In effect, a tran•sect refers to the rigorous depiction of vertical character and phenomena along a typically linear route through a landscape. However, as we have seen, the ability for the eye to visually move unimpeded from one end of the resulting transect drawing to the other does not inherently guarantee the physical ability to walk the very same route unobstructed. Like the editor working in the cutting room the assemble discrete film fragments to create a cohesive scene, the transect possesses the ability to gather and rearrange discrete points of experience into a new, highly compelling illusion—a graphically continuous network of spatial relations.

SCAPE Landscape Architecture, Oystertecture (2010). Courtesy of SCAPE.

Further, the flattening of depth along the 2-dimensional plane of the sheet of paper on which the transect is plotted means that any point of inflection along the original route is rendered undistinguishable, making it impossible to verify whether the route described is in fact as rigid and linear as Long’s excursion across the Challacombe Common might have been. In the extraordinary sectional transect prepared by the New York City-based firm SCAPE for their Oystertecture proposal in the Rising Currents exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art in 2010, for example, the original, North-facing, East-West route describing the firm’s proposed underwater oyster reefs across the Gowanus Flats immediately West of Red Hook takes a sudden, East by Northeast turn towards and through the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn. The result is a flat (2-d), continuous depiction of 3 individual segments spliced together along a dogleg route. Similarly, with Safari 7 (2010), a “self-guided tour of urban wildlife,” SCAPE explores the underground and surface landscapes connected by the #7 subway line in New York City as it runs East by Southeast from Times Square along 42nd Street, under the East River, then North by Northeast from Hunter’s Point South to Queensboro Plaza, and finally due East into Flushing, Queens. Anyone who has taken a subway ride knows that there is never a precise way to gauge the coordinates of underground travel other than the unerring sense that one is simply moving in one, steady direction: forward. Extending the subway-riding analogy to a sectional transect of the Safari 7 journey suggests that a flat (2-d), continuous, left-to-right view of the very same route may look linear, while in point of fact it is not.14

Kate Orff, Urban Landscape Lab; Janette Kim, Urban Landscape Lab; Glen Cummings, MTWTF, Safari 7 (2010). Courtesy of SCAPE.

This is the Flushing, Main Street-bound subway train. The Next stop is: 69th Street; 74th Street; 82nd Street; Junction Boulevard: the 20 irregularly-spaced stations located along the #7 subway route provide a distinct meter of experience. As the train slowly pulls to a halt at each stop, the Safari 7 participant can decide to disembark and explore local conditions at ground level before reboarding. Similarly, with their exploration of the 850-acre Hapsden Estate in England, Günther Vogt produced a representation of the 7-day linear walk in the form of a stack of 42 cross-sections taken at regular intervals along the original route. Each section documents the expanding or contracting expanse or viewshed—the territory that can be gleaned at these specific locations. As Jill Desimini and Charles Waldheim explain in Cartographic Grounds, “the distance seen [to the left and right of the walker as they move forward along the route] is the distance mapped.”15 Rendered in red and beginning at the bottom of the drawing, the original route, abstracted into a straight line, loses all pretense of geographical accuracy, its purpose simply being to indicate the position of the observer along each transect. Moving upward from the very bottom, the walker reaches each new section as they would have moving forward along the walk; this insistent degree of sectionality becomes almost cinematic in its effect—as if one had sliced through the landscape like a simple loaf of bread.

Gunther Vogt, Hapsden Estate: Shape of a Walk (2007-2008). Stack of 42 cross sections taken at regular intervals along the original route, sketched in plan below. This representation includes only 36 of the 46 sections. © VOGT.

4. Above / Under
Architectural drawings routinely represent the ground, and everything below the cutline or outside of the building foundation as poché, implying that this material is beyond the scope of the project […] When the properties relegated to poché matter deeply, then this omission should be cause for concern.16
—Stephanie Carlisle and Nicholas Pevzner, The Performative Ground: Rediscovering the Deep Section

Measured in terms of feet, miles, and days, Humboldt, Dürer, Long and Vogt had blazed routes of varying lengths. William Smith, a scientific contemporary of Humboldt’s and one of Dürer’s rightful heirs, sought instead to cast his analytical gaze across even greater extents of British countryside, systematically probing, gathering, comparing, correlating and synthesizing geological evidence he had encountered underfoot with known altitudes and distances. As much an act of walking as an act of imagination, Smith would accomplish something truly extraordinary for his time: a revolutionary new index of geological strata such as it would have appeared as if he had paced the land in one fluid sweep—from London to Sussex (40 miles), Bristol to Southampton (100 miles), or Snowdon to London (240 miles). If Dürer had sought to visually situate plants within the terrestrial medium in which they grew, Smith for his part had conceptually pried open the ground that had once supported his feet, using information he had himself verified in the field to help infer sub-surface conditions that had heretofore been invisible to the eye.

William Smith, Geological Section from London to Snowdon Showing the Varieties of the Strata and the Correct Altitudes of the Hills (1817). Detail from original drawing. Reproduced by permission of the Geological Society of London.

The impact of Smith’s work with respect to contemporary landscape practice is profound and cannot be underestimated: Stephanie Carlisle and Nicholas Pevzner note that “With more and more landscape projects today being built over infrastructure, over unstable soils, or even atop capped landfills, it is critical for landscape architects to deepen their understanding of complex site dynamics. While the visual action of landscape happens above ground, landscape architecture’s intelligence, technical problem-solving and performative attributes often occur beneath the surface.”17 For them, “Developing a fluency with ‘deep sections,’ or sectional representation techniques that make visible the wide range of site complexity while providing a critical tool for interdisciplinary collaboration and design exploration, can be a start of a shift towards a deeper grounding in how landscapes perform.”18 If Smith helped reveal the geological character of the ground beneath our feet, Carlisle and Pevzner similarly conclude that “The deep section also brings infrastructure, hidden both underground and in plain sight, to the forefront, expanding our understanding of the pre-conditions of projects and the boundaries of our interventions.”19

5. Accumulation, Juxtaposition
I began to wonder if it was possible to contain this terrain, and its contentiously muddied suppositions, in some type of meaningful suspension […]20
—Kathleen John-Alder

With the rise of digital methods of representation, the landscape designers, researchers and educators Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha were among the first to take the lead in developing unique approaches to study and represent “unstable ephemeral, transient, uncertain, interstitial, chaotic” terrains ranging from the lower Mississippi to Mumbai.21 Like midcentury commercial silkscreen printers building up rich hues by superimposing elemental colors, Mathur (1960–2022) and da Cunha carefully and patiently orchestrate meaning by layering their transects with archival materials (literary works, maps, technical specifications, documentary images) and precise notations produced during their own, firsthand encounters with these landscapes, producing delicate, elusive, highly analytical works. Referring to these investigations as Traverses, Mathur and da Cunha note that this hybrid form of representation resists easy interpretation while simultaneously offering fertile ground for landscape speculation.22 As they modestly explain, “We never start by thinking that we are doing an ‘alternative’ representation, or even a representation of something in the landscape. We start with very ordinary things, and we photograph, we draw, we dig into histories. Perhaps it is what we photograph, what we look at and research that makes the representations seem different—unconventional or even extraordinary.”23

Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha, Fire 1 (2006). Courtesy of Dilip da Cunha.

For Mathur and da Cunha, these palimpsests—representations characterized by overlapping layers, erasures, smudges and traces—function as powerful analogs of site conditions: this is to say that, in lieu of the sectional poché that traditionally connotes the safe ground, known as terra firma, a gradient of ‘spongy’ site conditions, neither completely dry nor completely wet, begins to emerge as the various graphic strata within the transect slowly dissolve into one another. Whether emulated digitally or produced via traditional silk-screening methods, this approach suggests wetting a dry sheet of paper (literally or not) so that it can receive new layers of information; in this way, the damp sheet of paper is not so different than the damp terrain it describes.

For her part, the landscape educator Kathleen John-Alder has made use of a different approach to achieve similar ambitions. In her exploration of the Lower Passaic River in New Jersey, she arranges several layers of information not over top of one another, as Mathur and da Cunha had themselves done, but rather in a state of “charged suspension.”24 Speaking metaphorically, it is as if John-Alder had literally produced a transect through one of Mathur and da Cunha’s own drawings—which function as stratified landscapes in their own right—to preserve the integrity of discrete layers of information. What results is something like the opposite of a palimpsest—a process of delamination into multiple, indexed layers of site information, ranging from “topography and water flow to storms and floods; population density and racial demographics; life expectancy and income; urbanization and sound; toxic sites and chemical pollutants; water quality, oxygen and phosphate levels; cultural history,” with denser, ‘heavier’ layers of information migrating to the bottom of the drawing while lighter layers rise to the top. And just as Günther Vogt had cleverly positioned the transects of the Hapsden Estate atop one another so that the points from which the 42 viewsheds were calculated would form into a single, organizing vertical red line inside the drawing, John-Alder employs a similar range of lines to help the reader visualize corresponding positions between individual transect layers. These vertical lines help the reader connect specific points in the site plan of the Passaic River at the top of the drawing to the very same location in any of the transects that lie below. Summarizing the ambitions of this dynamic and highly analytical form of representation, she explains that “The resulting stories […] thrive on movement and change, resist clean endings and generate a multitude of ideas that directly (and indirectly) link the way we look, speak and move through the world to the earthy details of life.”25 If we initially imagined the artist Richard Long moving along a single, highly rigid 10-mile long path in the landscape, here John-Alder achieves something quite new and innovative in her own right: in engaging with the resulting, hybrid transect, the reader is continually compelled to move not with their feet and in one direction, as Long or Vogt had done, but rather to navigate with their eyes, left to right, up and down, from one point to the next and back again, in the process challenging the static nature of the traditional transect.

Kathleen John-Alder, Descriptive Crosssection of the Passaic River Valley’s Physical and Social Topography (2021). Courtesy of Kathleen John-Alder.

Conclusion
Referring to their landscape Traverses, Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha explain that while they constitute “narratives, visual essays about the places we’ve researched [and that] they are not always done with the intention of implementing the project, they do often construct the ground for projects.”26 For them, the notion of ground is thus received in both literal terms—referring not only to the delineation of the profile of the land, but also more broadly in that it can help provide a solid foundation from which to approach the design of a complex site. Indeed, the sense of urgency with which contemporary practitioners continue to innovate in this area suggests that, far from a merely neutral set of representations, landscape transects remain the site of an extraordinary amount of innovation that bring together a level of artistry, creativity, inventiveness and analytical inquisitiveness that are strongly connected to, while also extending far beyond, the work of our forebears.

Notes
1. David Lewis, Paul Lewis & Mark Tsurumaki, Manual of Section (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2016), 6.
2. Examples include the American climber Alex Honnold’s 2017 solo ascent of El Capitan, a 3,000-foot granite wall in Yosemite National Park that is widely considered one of the most treacherous rock surfaces on the planet, without the use of any climbing gear. Honnold’s detailed notes, a single possible route up the wall, gathered during several preparatory trips, form a complex and carefully-rehearsed ballet—virtually a step-by-step list of contingent moves, hand grips and toeholds required to successfully and safely scale this unforgiving surface en route to the summit. Second is the extraordinary 2018 rescue of the 12 members of a youth soccer team and their coach who had ventured into Tham Luang Nang Non, a cave system located under Doi Nang Non, a mountain range between Thailand and Myanmar. Their disappearance led to an international search and rescue effort that required 10,000 participants. A team of divers discovered the team more than 2.5 miles underland from the mouth of the cave. At times, the route back to safety was merely 2 feet tall.

Diagram of Tham Luang Nang Non cave system, New York Times, 13 July 2018

3. Alexander von Humbolt and Aimé Bonpland, Essay on the Geography of Plants, ed. Stephen T. Jackson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 108.
4. Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge, “Screw Humboldt,” Medium, accessed October 15th, 2023, https://jorgecanizaresesguerra.medium.com/screw-humboldt-def1320213f5
5. Guillerme, Jacques, and Hélène Vérin, “The Archaeology of Section,” Perspecta 25 (1989), 228.
6. “Great Piece of Turf,” Wikipedia, accessed October 8, 2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Piece_of_Turf.
7. Francesco Careri, Walkscapes: Walking as an Aesthetic Practice (Barcelona: Editorial Gustavo Gili, 2002), back cover. Cited in Gareth Doherty, Paradoxes of Green: Landscapes of a City-State (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017), 35.
8. Starting point: 51° 8'37.87"N, 03°43'37.70"W. End point: 51°11'4.24"N, 03°56'28.09"W.
9. Günther Vogt, Distance and Engagement (Baden, Switzerland: Lars Müller Publishers, 2010), 372.
10. Gareth Doherty, Paradoxes of Green: Landscapes of a City-State, 33.
10. Doherty’s observation calls to mind another artistic performance—this time by the French acrobat Philippe Petit, who on August 7th 1974 rigged a taught steel cable between the tops of the 2 towers of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan and proceeded to walk several times across its 131-foot length. Hovering 110 stories above the city, Petit’s cable represented the only path out of, and back to, safety; nothing less than a life-line, the cable represented a new, temporary, and highly limited expression of Terra Firma, the very ground-line supporting Petit’s feet as the performer gingerly ventured into the chasm between the 2 buildings. Upon returning to the South tower, Petit would later be arrested by the New York City police department but released shortly thereafter. To be sure, the process of laying down exploratory routes through the landscape need not be nearly as transgressive or literal.

Philippe Petit walking a wire set between the World Trade Center Towers in New York, 7 August 1974

11. Doherty, Paradoxes of Green: Landscapes of a City-State, 33.
12. Ibid, 37.
13. Robert Smithson, as quoted in Marc Treib, “Traces Upon the Land: The Formalistic Landscape,” Architectural Association Quarterly 4 (1979), 37.
14. “Safari 7”, SCAPE, accessed April 7th, 2024, https://www.scapestudio.com/projects/981/. Note that the current #7 route now originates West of Times Square at Hudson Yards.
15. Jill Desimini and Charles Waldheim, Cartographic Grounds: Projecting the Landscape Imaginary (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2016), 194.
16. Stephanie Carlisle and Nicholas Pevzner, “The Performative Ground: Rediscovering the Deep Section,” accessed October 8, 2023, https://scenariojournal.com/article/the-performative-ground/
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Kathleen John-Alder, “Accumulation, juxtaposition, and no ideas but in things,” Journal of Landscape Architecture 16:3 (2021), 17.
21. Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha, “Waters Everywhere,” in Design in the Terrain of Water, ed. Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha (Applied Research & Design, 2014), 9-10.
22. See Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha, Deccan Traverses: The Making of Bangalore’s Terrain (Delhi: Rupa & Co., 2006), 215.
23. Nicholas Pevzner and Sanjukta Sen, “Preparing Ground: Anu Mathur and Dilip da Cunha in conversation with Nicholas Pevzner and Sanjukta Sen.”
24. John-Alder, “Accumulation, juxtaposition, and no ideas but inthings,” 13.
25. Ibid., 14-15.
26. Mathur and Dilip da Cunha in conversation with Nicholas Pevzner and Sanjukta Sen.

February 2025

Landing Strip

Landing Strip is a runway and resting facility for pilots set high in the desert. The project pays hommage to land artists like James Turrell and Robert Smithson, who used small airplanes to identify and document potential project sites across the American West.

Characterized by a finite length of asphalt (a runway with a clearly defined beginning and end), the Landing Strip constitutes the only true means of access to the site, as well as its entire reason for being: a transition point for refueling and resting.

Much like a plane approaching the runway is like a building to the ground, the Landing Strip addresses the idea of the ground line as an architectural project. As such, the section is used as the conceptual generator of spatial and programmatic relationships.

The Landing Strip is intended to be used not as a private retreat but rather as a shared piece of infrastructure, an oasis of sorts for planes and pilots on their way someplace else.

The site features showers and restrooms, a pool and lounging area, a maintenance garage, and refueling capabilities. All facilities are embedded in the ground, beneath the runway.

Like Walter de Maria’s Lightning Field, Landing Strip is an “unfinished” work that is completed over and over again by its engagement with the forces and patterns for which it was designed. To be sure, it is a finished installation of materials on a site, but one that is only completed fully when pilots land there, in transition and in need of fuel or rest. Even then its completeness lasts only for an instant. On days when no planes are in sight, the site resorbs into the landscape, invisible and empty, in anticipation of the next arrival.

For architecture, the Landing Strip suggests the possibility that completed projects be seen as open-ended projects that seek to work with an ever-changing set of conditions. In short, to conceive of the site as project is to invite the designer to strategically recognize and minimally mark potentials for occupation (for example, the lightning in De Maria’s project), teasing out qualities without overpowering them.

Walter de Maria, Cross, El Mirage Dry Lake, 1968

January 2008

From the Archives: 1997-2005

Every once in a while, I reach back on my hard drive to examine some work from the past 30 years.

Row 1
Miralles Pinos, Olympic Archery Range
SITE, Best Parking Lot
James Corner, Taking Measures Across the American Landscape
Bernd and Hilla Becher, Gazometers

Row 2
Ed Ruscha, Thirtyfour Parking Lots
Cedric Price, The City as an Egg
Diller+Scofidio, Slow House
Yves Brunier, Ambiances

Row 3
Superstudio, Grid Collages
David Hockney, Pool photomontages
Wayne Thiebaud, 24th Street Intersection
Morphosis, 6th Street House

Row 4
Gerhard Richter, Overpainted Photograph
John Baldessari, The Backs Of Old Trucks Passed While Driving From Los Angeles To Santa Barbara, Calif., Sunday 20 Jan. 63
Rem Koolhaas & Madelon Vriesendorp, The Story of the Pool
Robert Watts, A Fluxus Atlas

Row 5
Gordon Matta-Clark, Fake Estates
Aldo Rossi, Analogous City
Robert Irwin, Untitled
Talking Heads, More Songs About Buildings and Food

Row 6
Douglas Darden, Oxygen House
Stephen Isola (Cooper Union), Oboe
Robert Rauschenberg and Susan Weil, Sue
Le Corbusier, Swiss Pavilion, Cité Universitaire

Row 7
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Farnsworth House
Robert Smithson, Floating Island
Zoe Leonard, Bubblegum
Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Brugen, Buried Bicycle

Row 8
Joseph Cornell, Cabinet of Natural History
Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Learning from Las Vegas
Craig Breedlove, Spirit of America
Albrecht Dürher, Instrucitones Gemoetricae

Row 9
Jasper Johns, Dymaxion Map
Gary E. Graham, IBM Series III Copier Adjustment Parts Manual
Dennis Oppenheim, Beebe Lake Ice Cut
Dan Graham, Homes for America

Row 10
Daniel Libeskind, Micromegas
Stephen Smith, Sun City, Arizona
Bill Owens, Suburbia
Paul Auster, New York Trilogy

Row 11
Airstream, Family Holiday
Diller+Scofidio, Case no. 00-17163
Walter de Maria, Ligthing Field
Hans Haacke, Shapolsky et al.

Row 12
Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting / 4 Corners
Bill Kilban, Advanced Cartooning and Other Drawings
James Turrell, Roden Crater
Zaha Hadid, The Peak, Hong Kong

Row 13
Ed Ruscha, Every Building on the Sunset Strip
Ed Ruscha, Every Building on the Sunset Strip
Ed Ruscha, Every Building on the Sunset Strip

From the Archive: Summer 2004

Every once in a while, I reach back on my hard drive to examine some work from the past 30 years.

Date: Summer 2004
Site: Queens, NY
Project: [Fake] Fake Estates: Reconsidering Gordon Matta-Clark's Fake Estates

Completed in 2006, [Fake] Fake Estates offers a new take on Gordon Matta-Clark’s seminal 1975 Fake Estates project, in which the artist purchased and later documented 14 residual land parcels at auction in Queens for $25 each (a 2.33’ x 355’ long strip of land, a 1.83’ x 1.11’ lot, among others).

Using the online property database for the city of New York, I began this project by spending several months systematically canvassing the 360,000 individual properties that make up the borough of Queens. One click at a time, I began looking for residual properties (‘fake’ Fake Estates) similar to the thirteen parcels purchased and documented by Matta-Clark in 1973. The unexpected discovery of the 1/8”x110’ parcel among these suggests that the city as a whole—literally every square inch of it—is fully accounted for.

At the same time, I also performed a more informal consultation of the 23 Sanborn Map catalogs that make up the borough of Queens for [Fake] Fake Estates. Some of these map fragments are presented below. Highlighted in red, the lots are so small that they would easily evade the glance of even the most patient observer. The reader is looking both at the parcels in isolation, but also at the context around them—a complex geometrical framework of easements, adjustments, and historical property boundaries which offers clues as to the origins of these curious lots. Here are the beginnings of an atlas in a minor mode of Queens, NY, which illuminates some of the most absurd, intricate and graphically compelling situations nestled deep in the hundreds of Sanborn maps of the borough. Patiently revised over decades, these beautiful analog drawings offer a critical counterpoint in our age of digital information.

From the Archive: Fall 2004

Every once in a while, I reach back on my hard drive to examine some work from the past 30 years.

Date: Fall 2004
Site: Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah
Project: The Bonneville Salt Flats and the Land Speed Record, 1935-1970

Drawings are visual constructions that often emerge not quite fully formed. As a result, they require a great deal of graphic and conceptual refinement. Enclosed below is a selection of the drafts that led to a key diagram in my research on the Bonneville Salt Flats and the land speed record. For ease of comparison with the various drafts, I've included a portion of the final drawing (shown on the left). As the diagram gets more refined, the differences between the draft and the final version get progressively more subtle.

Final Draft / Progress Draft 01

Final drawing / Draft 05

Final drawing / Draft 06

Final drawing / Draft 10

Final drawing / Draft 11

Final drawing / Draft 15

Final drawing / Draft 16

Final drawing / Draft 17

Final drawing / Draft 18

Final drawing / Draft 19

Final drawing / Draft 20

Final drawing / Draft 21

Final drawing / Draft 22

Final drawing / Draft 23

Final drawing / Draft 27

Final drawing / Draft 29 (final)

October 2004

From the Archives: March 2011

Every once in a while, I reach back on my hard drive to examine some work from the past 30 years.

Bruce Davidson, Campground No. 4, Yosemite National Park,1966

Fully Serviced
Modern campsites embody a peculiar contradiction: they are marketed to perpetuate the cherished American ideal of the backwoods camp yet serviced by an increasingly sophisticated range of utilities and conveniences. Good's mock surprise that the original wilderness was not outfitted with amenities points to an increasingly common attitude: that nature is not only an Eden to be consumed, but that it is also expected to remain comfortable, visually and emotionally inspiring, its tangible effects negligible. Modern campground operators themselves emphasize this perception, typically closing facilities before seasonal temperatures plunge below the freezing point. As a result, most campers are so unlikely to ever confront the rigors of weather that a light evening frost, some persistent bugs, or a light rain might now count as hardships worthy of being recounted around the dinner table for years to come.

Good’s hyperbole also suggests that properly rusticated infrastructural components are not obstacles to, but rather a necessary condition of, the full enjoyment of nature. These components mark a specific potential for use: picnic tables for sitting and eating, fire pits around which to set up camp, wooden steps for negotiating difficult grades, and the like. Features such as campground taps (with filtered water often piped in from distant sources) reinforce this characterization of nature as an abstraction. Similarly, the introduction of electrical lighting in public campgrounds during the 1920s was received as a significant technological advance, artificially lengthening the day so that campers could remain on the road longer and not be caught pitching their tent in complete darkness.

During the late nineteenth century, the camp had been a site of intense activity for the recreating sportsmen and their local guides who would salt and dry game and fish, feed hunting dogs, repair and adjust rifles and rods, and recount entertaining stories around the campfire. Bruce Davidson’s wonderfully ironic 1966 photograph of Yosemite National Park (shown in the exhibit introduction) illustrates the extent of a radical physical transformation far beyond what even advocates like Albert Good may have envisioned: the camp has been reduced to a glorified pantry¬, where imported goods are merely consumed. Spread amidst the visual field of debris that is the campsite, a box of Ritz crackers near the geometrical center of the picture is identified as the true visual and narrative focus of the scene.

Davidson's photograph prompts an important question: when does the adventure of camping, over-loaded by the quotidian, blurs into an experience altogether so ordinary, so familiar, that it ceases to hold any of its old, almost mythical power? In other words, when does camping cease to be camping? The answer may largely be a matter of perception: purists might gasp at the availability of flush toilets, while others might draw the line at the necessity of driving to the campsite, or the opportunity of overnighting an $300,000 RV in a Walmart parking lot. The ability to hook in and watch a nationally televised baseball game from the concrete pad outside a late-model RV using campground-provided cable, or to send emails wirelessly from the campsite picnic table—standard amenities at most KOAs—surely bespeaks the near total elimination of boundaries between the home and away.

Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait, Camping in the Woods—A Good time Coming, 1862.

Comfort and the illusion of rusticity
For all the scenic charm of its lakeside campsite in the Adirondacks, Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait’s widely circulated 1878 lithograph for Currier and Ives sends a reassuring message to its affluent, urban audience, suggesting that patrons traveling to the region need not perform any of the daily tasks required of camp life on their own. Key activities like hunting, fishing, and cooking are construed as forms of utilities that can be accomplished by local guides (a convenience doubly valuable since most patrons could not perform these tasks even if so inclined). Dressed in a bowtie, vest, and jacket to “keep up appearances and to avoid the sense of living in an uncouth or barbarous way,” Tait's care-free tourist can be easily identified—not for his manner of dress or pictorial standing within the image, but because he isn’t really doing anything.

"An insulating barrier of technology"
In Forever Wild: Environmental Aesthetics and the Adirondack Preserve, author Phillip Terrie argues that “[…] the sportsman never really felt at home in the wilderness, he depended on an insulating barrier of technology, civilized comforts, and psychological buffers to keep himself from being overwhelmed by the vastness of nature and by an environment in which he perceived himself to be somehow out of place."

This imagined scene puts a contemporary spin to Terrie's observations by rewarding Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait’s Adirondacks campers to a shopping spree at Campmor, a popular mail-order and online retailer based in New Jersey. Smartly concealing the highly sophisticated and diversified nature of its equipment, the company’s hand-illustrated catalog recalls an earlier, folksier era of camping where mismatched plates and other faded domestic items constituted the bulk of one's camping gear. Speculating on the idea of a contemporary "insulating barrier of technology", the scene is focused not externally on the context surrounding the site but on 32 brand new, shiny pieces of gear customized for the rigors of the modern campsite (a solar radio, a self-inflating air mattress, etc...). For many, it is the supercharged nature of this display, and not the campsite's natural setting, that constitutes its own form of seduction.

Auto bed sold by the Alward-Anderson Southard Company, 1925

On-site / off-site
Before the incremental and systematic implementation of modern utilities like those described in Motor Camping, recreational campers have to transport an array of domestic apparatus (including water basins, tables, chairs, stoves, tents, etc.) from one campground to another. To carry all these comforts, touring automobiles are outfitted with sideboard lockers, trailers, and even built-in unfolding tents and tables. The motor vehicle quickly becomes integral to the camping experience, not only for what it can transport but also as an extension of the campsite. In the 1920s—an era that predates campers and RVs—trade advertisements trumpet curious inventions such as hammocks strewn inside automobiles and engine surfaces that double as hot plates for preparing meals.

John Cuthbert Long and John Dietrichjoint Long, Motor Camping, 1923

The campground as utility
Consolidating information on over 2,000 municipal, state, and federal facilities, chapter XIII of Motor Camping by John Cuthbert Long and John Dietrichjoint Long (1923) stands out as the first true first directory of U.S. campgrounds. This comprehensive 110-page inventory provides for the first time tangible evidence that the campground is no longer merely an open spot to set up camp but also a place increasingly defined by utility. Arranged state by state in a six-column matrix, the authors establish rigid criteria that allow campers to compare—in advance of arrival—the relative merits of potential destinations.

Increasing specifications
The evolution of on-site campground utilities since the 1923 publication of Motor Camping inventory is remarkable: in the case of National Park Service facilities, the matter of showers—a simple yes/no datum for the Long brothers—now elicits a range of responses: cold water; hot water; coin operated; nearby; in summer only; none. During research leading to this exhibit, online descriptions of the Park Service’s 462 campgrounds were systematically compiled and inventoried, revealing a range of no less than 56 different aspects related to campground life—a far cry from Motor Camping's original 6 criteria matrix.

Similar analysis of other campground systems has produced a comparably wide breadth of criteria, and both the internal consistency of description within systems and the overlap between systems proves revealing. From the variety of descriptions it is quickly evident that National Park Service campgrounds are uniquely tailored to site constraints, with no two facilities quite being presented in the same manner. Contrast this with the descriptions provided for New York State campgrounds—one of the most comprehensive park systems in the country: each location is described far more systemically, and an emphasis on recreational activities (particularly water-based) and disability access is evident. Always the pragmatist, KOA goes to great lengths to lay out the various types of accommodations available at its campgrounds (hookups, patio types, kabins, campsites), and may spare a few words on recreational opportunities.

October 2013

From the Archives: Summer 2011

Every once in a while, I reach back on my hard drive to examine some work from the past 30 years.

Animation by Mark Warfel, based on drawings and script by Martin Hogue

A camp proper is a nomad’s binding-place. He may occupy it for a season, or only for a single night, according as the site and its surroundings please or do not please the wanderer’s whim. If the fish do not bite, or the game has moved away, or unpleasant neighbors should intrude, or if anything else goes wrong, it is but an hour’s work for him to pull up stakes and be off, seeking that particularly good place which generally lies beyond the horizon’s rim.
Horace Kephart, Camping and Woodcraft

X Marks the Spot
The first act of camping is laying claim to the site. As seductive as the image of the camper pitching a tent may be, this "inherited symbol of high adventure," no longer constitutes the first gesture of occupation. Before the car or RV is even parked , before the supplies are unloaded, crucial events have in fact already occurred: some visitors may have reserved their campsite days, weeks, or even months in advance using an online reservation system; others have called the campground from the road hours earlier to secure a spot; before they gain access to the campground, these and all other incoming campers will have met one-on-one with a campground attendant, exchanged perfunctory information (camper's name, address, license plate number, credit card information), received a parking pass and a facilities map denoting the precise location of their campsite. By this time, the attendant has probably grabbed a handy fluorescent marker and preformed The Circling—marking in ink that location agreed upon by the two individuals and thereby ingeniously supporting the illusion of the 'cleared site': like a signature, this simple personal gesture makes each copy of the map (and therefore each individual visit to the campground) seem original, as if each site were being claimed for the first time.

Beyond its obvious way-finding benefits, the map possesses a peculiar kind of agency: this visual diagram employs graphic strategies that reveal little or nothing of the surrounding environment. Significantly, this cartographic representation promotes an awareness of the campground as a self-sufficient territory independent of its natural surroundings. Depicting numbered plots, roads, trails, bathrooms, showers, water taps, wood bins, canteens, boat launches, and the like, the map offers information through which we can understand and use the campground as a landscape; it not only situates but also establishes, reminding us of the limits of encampment, and of our place inside these limits.

While maps denote individual campsites, the use of similar graphic strategies across campgrounds of every stripe suggests that they are all in some ways rather generic. Ironically, the X marked in fluorescent ink on the map reduces the specific place to an impersonal coordinate. The mark seems at once an imperative (“Camp here”) and a record of an event—the classic pin on a map of places visited. Site is no longer a spatial condition defined by unique surroundings, but rather an abstract designation, akin to a suburban tract or urban parcel. The act of claiming a site is reduced to a choice between competing amenities: Near the bathroom or the water tap? Near the RV loop? How far away are my neighbors?

To preserve the carefully staged illusion of discovering and dwelling in the wilderness, the modern campsite must function as a perpetually unfinished site, provisionally completed each time a new visitor completes the steps described above. The delicate balance between the physical clearing of trees and ground vegetation with the relative absence of fixed infrastructural components beyond picnic tables and fire-pits creates a persuasive sense of rusticity. The loosely domesticated site requires the participation of campers who, importing their own equipment—tent, food, sleeping bags—make its inhabitance possible. By later taking care to pack up all belongings and remove all waste, each group fulfills the final ritual of camping while also unintentionally preparing the site for the next occupant. This unending cycle allows each group of travelers the feeling that they have discovered a site and participated in its construction by temporarily staking claim to it for the night. Hundreds of campers may occupy the same site in a single season, but each will remain unknown to the others.

Read the full article published in the journal PLACES

1865–1895
First camps
Stemming from a belief that outdoor experiences can be both physically and spiritually rejuvenating, recreational camping in the United States emerges in the decades following the Civil War. Writing in The Meridian Literary Recorder in 1867, William Henry Harrison Murray's description of a trip to the Adirondacks abounds with claims of restoration: “Indeed, it is marvelous what benefit physically is often derived from a trip of a few weeks to these woods. To such as are afflicted with that dire parent of ills, dyspepsia, or have lurking in their system consumptive tendencies, I most earnestly recommend a month’s experience among the pines. The air which you there inhale is such as can be found only in high mountainous regions, pure rarefied, and bracing… This is no exaggeration, as some who will read these lines now.” The dedication of the newly formed Adirondack Park in 1892 consecrates the reputation of this recreational destination in the minds of wealthy East Coast patrons from New York, Hartford, Boston, and other major urban centers.

1890–1910
Railroad camps
The first organized tourist camps on a large scale are established in the American West by railroad operators for the benefit of visitors interested in exploring the new national parks. Located within easy access and developed as operating concessions, the camps function as bases for a range of light outdoor activities and guided day trips to the region. Sturdy wooden platforms support tents well-appointed with comfortable beds and other amenities. The wealthy guests remain entirely comfortable as they “rough it” in the wilderness.

1910–1920
Roadside camping
Horace Kephart’s exhortation to take to the wild, "to pull up stakes" and move elsewhere at one's whim is quickly embraced by early motorists, who reject the tyranny of organization and the artificial trappings of late nineteenth-century railroad tours of the American West: "You are your own master, the road is ahead; you eat as you please, cooking your own meals over an open fire; sleeping when you will under the stars, waking with the dawn; swim in a mountain lake when you will, and always the road ahead. Thoreau at 29 cents a gallon." Railroad tours may have been the province of the wealthy, but affordable automobiles like the Ford Model T open up recreational opportunities for the growing middle class: “In regard to expense, it is safe to say that anyone who can afford a car and vacation can likewise afford a motor camping trip.” Specially outfitted with a panoply of customizable features that allow for the easy transportation and deployment of gear and supplies, the automobile constitutes the utilitarian epicenter of the campsite, anticipating the self-sufficient modern RV.

1910–1920
"The Gasoline Rule of Motor Camping"
Motor tourists' lack of awareness and woodcraft experience can lead to a certain carelessness towards natural settings that adversely affects both wildlife and following campers. As the process of decamping at the sight of an angry farmer becomes as quick as folding-in a pop-out tent, campers easily overlook the none-too-subtle traces of their own presence. Common signs of previous encampment include unextinguished campfires, empty food cans, and human excrement. Reflecting the contemporary maxim that what is packed in should be packed out, F. Everett Brimmer's "Golden Rule—or the Gasoline Rule—of motor camping" is roundly ignored by most: "If there is any message … that I would sear with words deeply grooved into the plastic record of the brain so that it could never be forgotten, it would be this: Autocamp upon others as you would have others autocamp upon you".

1915–1920
Spatial enclosure: first campgrounds
For as much damage as campers do to their surroundings, nature repeatedly proves to be equally dangerous to unskilled tenters. Then as now, the prevailing perception of Nature is one of peace, comfort, and visual and emotional inspiration; early twentieth-century campers often mistakenly place their trust in quaint, scenic roadside tableaus, unsuspecting that, say, the sparkling water from a cold, clear stream might be polluted by a nearby town, or even other campers. James Belasco writes that by 1920 campers are exposed to diseases like typhoid that were no longer found in cities. Organized campgrounds originate as much from the need to protect unsuspecting tenters from such harm as from the need to spare nature from these very same individuals. By confining campers within a specified zone, these first campgrounds prevent visitors from occupying just any place they might otherwise gain access to. The availability of basic services (water, bathrooms, fire pits) means that individual camping parties no longer needed to carry as much equipment from one campsite to the next and ensure some basic standard of sanitation.

1915–1925
The campfire as social center
Early campgrounds remain informal in their general layout, but a rich social dynamic develops around large evening campfires. Campers come together for late night bull sessions, debating the merits of other camps and sharing stories of the open road. Here the social formality insisted upon at home just doesn’t exist: "Perhaps for the first time one realizes the common America—and loves it… It is the enforced democracy and the sense of common ownership in these parks that works this magic. They have rediscovered to us the American people. Elsewhere travelers divide among resorts and hotels according to the ability to pay, and maintain their home attitudes. In the national parks they are just Americans.”

1923–1926
Spatial enclosure and controls
The overwhelming popularity of camping across the country leads to a rapid degradation of national parks and municipal campgrounds, where not only tourists but also hundreds of out-of-work families and vagrants try to settle permanently. To counter these migrations, campground operators develop a range of practices of varying degrees of subtlety. Among the most enduring are time restrictions, pillow counts, admission fees, and registration procedures. A spectrum of physical barriers including fences and moats now serve a dual purpose of keeping the campers out of harm and keeping undesirables out.

1925–1930
Managing individual campsites
Looking back on Yosemite’s early campgrounds, Stanford Demars observed that “it was commonly joked—and not without some truth—that the first camper to drive his automobile out of the campground on a holiday morning was likely to dismantle half of the campground in the process due to the common practice of securing tent lines to the handiest object available—including automobile bumpers.” The concept of individually allotted sites originates with large facilities such as Denver’s Overland Park (1917–1930). Spanning 160 acres along the Platte River, the campground built a national following by offering a range of attractions that becomes the envy of municipal campgrounds nationwide. Its reputation as the “Manhattan of auto camps” owes to its grid of 800 individual lots that collectively can accommodate up to 6,000 autocampers each night. The campground is no longer an amorphous gathering of vehicles, tents and cables; rather, this arrangement involves a high degree of spatial organization and sophisticated systems to collect fees, track camping parties, and monitor the length of stays.

1928–1932
Emilio Meinecke: the parking spur
Expressing concern about the steady degradation of ecologically sensitive areas in national parks, plant pathologist Emilio Meinecke is the first to codify the potentially destructive role of the automobile: “Man injures only those smaller plants he actually tramples under foot. The car, much clumsier to handle, crushes shrubs and sideswipes trees, tracing off living bark and severely injuring them. Oil, a deadly poison to plants, drips from the parked automobile.” Meinecke's enduring contribution to campground design is to expand the organizational system of the campground to integrate vehicular traffic. He proposes one-way loop roads that lead automobiles to individual parking spurs next to each campsite. In this light, the plot is as much about accommodating the automobile in the landscape as it is about establishing a territory for the camper.

1935–present
Trailers and RVs
The emergence of heavier, more sophisticated trailers requires a yet-more-generous re-engineering of Meinecke's pull-off spur and the integration of various infrastructural hookups (electrical and sewage, among others). This leads to the progressive segregation of RVs, as they are increasingly confined to their own loop within the campgrounds. Trailers and RVs are so popular in the 1930s that there are no less than 400 individual companies (Kozy Coach, Rollohome, Silver Streak) manufacturing trailers and motorhomes across the country. Only a few of these early pioneers (Airstream, Fleetwood) remain in existence today.

1970–present
Advance reservations
As the social conventions surrounding the campfire die away, campers increasingly turn to campground operators for knowledge of the road ahead. Like the hotel chains it emulates, Kampground of America (KOA) is among the first to take advantage of this new demand with a toll-free advance reservation phone number, mass mailings of its campground directory, and the option to use one’s credit card to hold a space in advance of arrival. By the 1980s third-party entities like ReserveAmerica seek to appropriate this virtual-access model by matching campers to campgrounds through a sophisticated phone reservation system and later a web-based service. Online information duplicates and enhances knowledge once available only on the ground, at the site: campground maps, detailed specs, and photographs of individual campsites are available for thousands of private and public facilities, often from the same website. To ensure fair access, some national park campgrounds now accept online reservations up to six months in advance. For the avid practitioner, camping has thus become a year-round activity, alternating in two seasons between the real and the virtual, on the ground and in the imagination.

October 2013

From the Archive: Summer 2011-Fall 2013

Every once in a while, I reach back on my hard drive to examine some work from the past 30 years.

1,150 Kampgrounds: KOA Franchises Time Line

Behind KOA's highly visible and successful brand lies an uncomfortable fact—that nearly two-thirds of the facilities ever opened by the camping giant are now closed. Using the campground directories issued annually by KOA, I was able to reconstittue a precise timeline for no less than 1,158 individual facilities over the company's entire history. converting the Excel spreadsheet to a drawing, the timeline foregrounds the highly unstable nature of the camping business, which, unlike national and state parks, remains subject to land values, gas prices, and other key economic indicators.

From the Archives: November 2013

Every once in a while, I reach back on my hard drive to examine some work from the past 30 years.

An entry submitted to the Metis International Gardens Festival on the Northern shore of the St-Lawrence River, Under Construction / On this site examines the cycle of installation and dismantling of gardens around the festival grounds. Each year visitors experience new projects as well as others that remain on the grounds for extended periods of time. Returning visitors may also recall past projects that have now been taken down. With its temporary plywood construction fencing blocking access to the site, the installation allows curious onlookers to drill through the history of a specific garden plot on the Metis festival grounds and peek at a photographic inventory of projects installed there since the first edition in 2000.

October 2012

From the Archive: Spring 2019

Every once in a while, I reach back on my hard drive to examine some work from the past 30 years.

A space of time that is filled, always filled, with moving.
Gertrude Stein

Featured here is a sampling of the collection of Interstate 90 postcards I accumulated on ebay as part of my preparations for the I-90 studio I led during the Spring 2019 semester at Cornell. These postcards are loosely arranged in geographical order to form an uninterrupted, 3,020 mile road span that physically and metaphorically links Boston and Seattle via Springfield, MA, Albany, NY, Cleveland, OH, Chicago, IL, Madison, WI, Sioux Falls, SD, and Spokane, WA.running East to West. The postcards are presented in geographical order, running East to West.

From the Archive: August 2022

Every once in a while, I reach back on my hard drive to examine some work from the past 30 years. In this edition, I share 30 of the nearly 60 cover studies (and evolving book subtitles) generated for my book Making Camp: A Visual History of Camping's Most Essential Items and Activities to achieve the vintage look the publisher was interested in for the cover.

February 2025

On the Road

University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, College of Fine + Applied Arts, Temple Hoyne Buell Hall Gallery, March 2014

Stone Quarry Hill Art Park, John and Virginia Winner Memorial Gallery
925,000 Campsites: The Commodification of an American Experience
10 June – 28 June 2017.

SUNY Morrisville, Donald G. Butcher Library
925,000 Campsites: The Commodification of an American Experience
26 February – 9 June 2017.

Lawrence Technical University, College of Architecture and Design
925,000 Campsites: The Commodification of an American Experience
04 November – 31 December 2016. Solo exhibit.

Parsons School of Design
925,000 Campsites: The Commodification of an American Experience
08 September – 03 October 2016.

University of Southern California, School of Architecture
925,000 Campsites: The Commodification of an American Experience
14 – 25 March 2016.

Ball State University, College of Architecture and Planning, CAP Gallery
925,000 Campsites: The Commodification of an American Experience
16 November – 18 December 2015.

University of Georgia, College of Environment and Design, Circle Gallery
925,000 Campsites: The Commodification of an American Experience
19 February – 25 March 2015.

California State Polytechnic University at Pomona, Don B. Huntley Gallery
925,000 Campsites: The Commodification of an American Experience
30 October – 21 November 2014.

WUHO (Woodbury University Hollywood Outpost) Gallery Los Angeles
925,000 Campsites: The Commodification of an American Experience
03–26 October 2014.

Penn State University, Stuckeman School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, Rouse Gallery
925,000 Campsites: The Commodification of an American Experience
18 August –19 September 2014.

University of Colorado, College of Architecture and Planning
925,000 Campsites: The Commodification of an American Experience
08 May– 08 August 2014.

University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, College of Fine + Applied Arts, Temple Hoyne Buell Hall Gallery
925,000 Campsites: The Commodification of an American Experience
31 March – 11 April 2014.

Washington University St. Louis, Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts, Givens Hall
925,000 Campsites: The Commodification of an American Experience
17 February – 21 March 2014.

University of Nebraska, College of Architecture
925,000 Campsites: The Commodification of an American Experience
21 January – 07 February 2014.

State University of New York, College of Environmental Science and Forestry, Department of Landscape Architecture
925,000 Campsites: The Commodification of an American Experience
11–15 November 2013.

Cornell University, College of Art, Architecture and Planning, John Hartell Gallery, Sibley Dome
925,000 Campsites: The Commodification of an American Experience
06 October – 02 November 2013.

Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Davis Gallery at Houghton House
[Fake] Fake Estates: Reconsidering Gordon Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates
14 October – 07 November 2011.

University of Utah, College of Architecture and Planning
A Site Constructed: The Bonneville Salt Flats and the Land Speed Record, 1935-1970
March 10-April 15, 2011

Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI)
Wendover Exhibit Hall, Wendover, UT
A Site Constructed: The Bonneville Salt Flats and the Land Speed Record, 1935-1970
July 2008-January 2011

University of Arkansas, School of Architecture
[Fake] Fake Estates: Reconsidering Gordon Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates
25 August – 08 October 2008.

University of Texas at Arlington, School of Architecture
[Fake] Fake Estates: Reconsidering Gordon Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates
10 March – 28 March 2008.

Texas Tech University, College of Architecture
[Fake] Fake Estates: Reconsidering Gordon Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates
November – 07 December 2007.

University of Texas at Austin, School of Architecture, Mebane Gallery
[Fake] Fake Estates: Reconsidering Gordon Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates
February 19-April 6, 2007
Opening and lecture: February 15, 2007

Ohio State University, Knowlton School of Architecture, Banvard Gallery
[Fake] Fake Estates: Reconsidering Gordon Matta-Clark]s Fake Estates
January 15-February 9, 2007

University of Texas at Austin, School of Architecture, Mebane Gallery
[Fake] Fake Estates: Reconsidering Gordon Matta-Clark]s Fake Estates
February 19-April 6, 2007

Municipal Art Society of New York, Urban Center galleries
November 15, 2006-January 10, 2007

Syracuse University, School of Architecture, Warehouse gallery
[Fake] Fake Estates: Reconsidering Gordon Matta-Clark]s Fake Estates
February 13 – March 17, 2006

University at Buffalo, School of Architecture and Planning, Dyett Gallery
October 15-November 9, 2006
Opening and gallery talk: October 23, 2006

University of Nebraska, School of Architecture gallery
A Site Constructed: The Bonneville Salt Flats and the Land Speed Record, 1935-1970
November 4-19, 2004

Curated: Films, Lectures, and Exhibits

Fall 2001

Spring 2006

Spring 2019

Spring 2013

2012-2013

2015-2016

Spring 2007

Fall 2005

Spring 2005

Spring 2004

Fall 2003

Spring 2003

Fall 2002

Spring 2002

Fall 2001

June 2013

Holiday Visuals: Films and Cards

2006-2007 holiday card

In recent years, my partner Lori and i have made an annual tradition of sending digital holiday greeting visuals to our friends and family. More recently, we've begun to make short films to substitute for our more traditional, "2-d" holiday greeting cards.

2009-2010 holiday card

2019-2020 holiday card

2005-2006 holiday card

2020-2021 holiday card

2010-2011 holiday card

2011-2012 holiday card
Our camera was permanently damaged following the making of this film.

2004-2005 holiday card

2016-2017 holiday card

2002-2003 holiday card

2003-2004 holiday card

2018-2019 holiday card