On View> Victoria Sambunaris’ Photography Captures Human Interactions with Landscape
Untitled (Distant steam vents, Yellowstone), 2008. (Victoria Sambunaris)
Victoria Sambunaris: Taxonomy of a Landscape
Museum of Contemporary Photography
600 South Michigan Avenue
Chicago, IL
Through March 31
Victoria Sambunaris has photographed the American landscape from coast to coast, investigating human interaction with and relationship to the natural environment. Over a decade’s worth of color photographs taken with a 5 by 7 field camera capture the multiple layers of America’s expansive landscapes that are interrupted by human development. Born to Greek immigrant parents driven by the American dream, Sambunaris has become fascinated and identifies with the unease of the Mexico/United States border. Her photographs of over 2,000 miles of these borderlands suggest an innate similarity between the two lands in spite of national boundaries. Taxonomy of a Landscape also includes a complete archive of Sambunaris’ travels with maps, journals, road logs, collected souvenirs, and sketches.
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- Untitled (Santa Elena Canyon, Big Bend National Park, Texas), 2010
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- Untitled, Orange Scheider, Fort Worth, TX, 2000
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- Untitled, Houses, Wendover, UT, 2007
Northerly Island to Soon Become Lake Michigan Oasis
Northerly Island will soon begin to take shape as an oasis in Lake Michigan. (Courtesy Studio Gang & Chicago Park District)
Gazing at Chicago from the east, it’s impossible to ignore the city’s towering skyline. But the latest gem on the southwest shores of Lake Michigan won’t be made from glass and steel—it’s prairie grass and wetlands.
Northerly Island, a 91-acre peninsula that juts into Lake Michigan just south of the Loop, was promised a visionary makeover from Studio Gang and landscape architects JJR in 2010. Now the Chicago Park District and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers are preparing to break ground this fall.
9/11 Memorial Plaza: How It Works
(all images courtesy Peter Walker Partners)
A decade after the 9/11 attacks, the public will soon be able to visit the site, much of which has been fully transformed into the 9/11 Memorial Plaza. While many were dispirited by the years of revisions to and deviations from the Libeskind master plan (which itself had many detractors), AN‘s recent visit to the plaza, crowded with workers laboring toward the anniversary opening, revealed a vast, contemplative space that we predict will function well as both a memorial and a public space. Next week AN will take a look at the design and offer a preview of the what the public can expect from the space, but, first, a look at how the highly engineered plaza works.
A Garden for Pondering in Philadelphia
The Rodin Museum Garden with The Thinker beyond. (all images courtesy OLIN)
OLIN has completed a renovation of the gardens at Philadelphia’s Rodin Museum, which houses the largest collection of Auguste Rodin’s sculptures and objects outside of Paris. The renovation is a piece of a larger refurbishment of Benjamin Franklin Parkway, which is also being overseen by OLIN, as a part of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Master Plan. Read More
Competition> Envision a Future for the Pruitt-Igoe Site
Pruitt-Igoe as planned. (all images courtesy Pruitt-Igoe Now)
Building on the renewed interest in the destruction of the Pruitt-Igoe public housing complex in St. Louis, a new competition looks to engage the history and inspire possible future uses for the 33 acre site. Nearly 40 years after the demolition–which Charles Jencks claimed signaled the death of Modern architecture itself–most of the site remains cleared, filled in with trees and grasses that have sprung up over time. Organized by the newly formed non-profit Pruitt-Igoe Now, the competition brief asks, “Can this site itself be liberated from a turbulent and mythologized past through re-imagination and community engagement?” Read More
Helsinki Park By Robert Wilson To Pay Tribute to Tapio Wirkkala
The planned park designed by Robert Wilson (courtesy The Art Newspaper)
The famed stage designer Robert Wilson is trying his hand at park design with a new commission in Helsinki dedicated to the memory of the designer Tapio Wirkkala, according to The Art Newspaper. The rectangular park–a garden, really–will be divided into nine rooms, each symbolizing different domestic spaces. One outdoor room, for example, will feature a small fireplace surrounded by stone seating. Read More
Swamps Emerging on the Urban Landscape
An urban swamp in Detroit (Photo by Clark Mizono)
While bringing nature back into the city is generally heralded as a sign of improvement, this is hardly the best path to that end. Next American City‘s Willy Staley recently took a walk through Detroit‘s East Side with vacant property guru Sam Butler to surmise the problems of abandonment facing the city. Detroit, seeking to demolish some 3,000 structures, has long been at the center of a movement to “shrink” cities suffering from population loss and blight.
More on urban swamps bogging down neighborhood revitalization.
Such Great Heights
Blue Ridge Pass by Maya Lin (images courtesy Arts Club of Chicago)
Winter makes Chicagoans crave a sense of escape. An intriguing new exhibition of Maya Lin’s work at the Arts Club of Chicago provides a timely opportunity to visit, visually at least, some fascinating terrain. With its small and large-scale sculpture and installations, viewers can travel from mountain peaks to the bottom of the sea. Read More
Northerly Night
The Chicago skyline as seen from Northerly Island. (photo:-bc/flickr)
The Chicago Parks District is holding a public meeting on the future of Northerly Island tonight at the Spertus Institute from 6-9pm. The 91-acre peninsula, which is connected to the lakefront by a causeway, has played an important and evolving role in Chicago’s civic imagination. It figures prominently in the Burnham Plan, was home to 1933-1934 World’s Fair, and later the Meigs Field airport, and was part of the 2016 Olympic bid. The meeting will offer a preview of plans for the island and solicit public comment.
At Home in Dystopia
J.G. Zimmerman, Dystopia Series: Suburbia (all images courtesy of the respective artists.)
Friend of AN Jeremiah Joseph visited an exhibition of interest in New York’s gallery district.
Et in Arcadia Ego, a new exhibition at the Thornton Room in Chelsea, examines the intersection and overlap of natural and man-made landscapes. With the title, roughly translated from Latin, “I am in pastoral utopia,” the show, curated by Blanca de la Torre and Juanli Carrion, could easily devolve into a Nature equals Good, City equals Bad equation. Instead, the way the six artists explore the topic is not so divisive or stale. The work tends to engage the subject from the side, generating surreal results. At the end any answers are farther off than before viewing the work, and this ambiguity is show’s strength. It prevents the viewer from standing too sure-footed and jumping ahead to conclusions and prejudices. Read More
Inside Out, Outside In
The Pembroke Hill School campus before Gisolfi's redesign.
Peter Gisolfi’s oeuvre is diverse enough to merit five separate categories in his new book Finding the Place of Architecture in the Landscape: townscape, campus, landscapes and buildings, gardens and houses, and transformation. Read More
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