Overview

Ambiguous Territory brings together the work of over forty architects, landscape architects, artists, and historians engaged in an exploration of art and design’s place in a time of environmental uncertainty and existential threat. Conceived in both environmental and disciplinary terms, the concept of 'ambiguous territory' seeks to define conditions of uncertainty between nature and culture as well as architecture, art, and landscape. Ambiguous Territory advances the argument that it is through such forms of transdisciplinary practice that new opportunities emerge for creative thinking about our changing relationship to the Earth. What stories can art and design tell about the effects of global warming and its fundamental reordering of our perceived distinction between nature and culture? Ambiguous Territory brings together the work of architects, landscape architects, artists, and historians to present stories and depictions of a postnatural world and its effects of alienation on traditional forms of identity and meaning. Initially staged as an exhibition and related symposium at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan before traveling to the Elmaleh Gallery at the University of Virginia, Pratt Manhattan Gallery, and Handwerker Gallery at Ithaca College, the work included in this volume can be seen to engage estrangement as a productive site of intellectual and creative potential. Resisting at once naive optimism and cynical pessimism about the place of art and design in a time of environmental uncertainty and existential threat, Ambiguous Territory explores a opportunities for creative thinking and aesthetic practices that question as well as reinvent our relationship to the Earth, enabling us to see things anew, or simply to probe where we might be heading. Out of what kind of fog? Into what kind of New World?

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9781948765657

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Ambiguous Territories is, in other words, both a manifesto in search of actions, and an encyclopedia of possible current tactics in search of an aesthetic. Perhaps that is appropriate: Rather than offering a how-to guide that might have worked for us in more certain times, they present us with a printed Pinterest board of possible images of a future that might have already started. I hope architects will use these to create better, more evocative structures that might both shelter us and allow us to act today. --ARCHITECT, THE JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF ARCHITECTS

Author Information

Cathryn Dwyre is Adjunct Associate Professor at the School of Architecture at Pratt Institute where she is a member of the interdisciplinary research group Inclusive Ecologies. She is co-principal of the experimental art, design, and curatorial practice pneumastudio with Chris Perry, with whom she was a recipient of the MacDowell Fellowship. Exhibition venues that have featured pneumastudio's work include the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens, the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, and the Design Museum of Barcelona. Cathryn received a Master of Landscape Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania after receiving a B.A. in philosophy and geology from Colgate University. She previously served as managing editor of ViaBooks and its volume Dirt (MIT Press, 2012), and with Chris Perry is co-editor of a special issue of PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art (MIT Press, 2015). Prior to her design and academic career, Cathryn spent over ten years in leadership of technology startup companies and currently serves as a member of the Board of Directors for Basilica Arts, a non-profit multidisciplinary arts organization located in Hudson, NY. Chris Perry is Associate Professor, Associate Dean, and Director of the Master of Science in Architecture program at the School of Architecture at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He is co-principal of the experimental art, design, and curatorial practice pneumastudio with Cathryn Dwyre, with whom he was a recipient of the MacDowell Fellowship. Exhibition venues that have featured pneumastudio's work include the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens, the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, and the Design Museum of Barcelona. He received a Master of Architecture from Columbia University, a B.A. in philosophy from Colgate University, and was a Presidential Fellow in MIT's doctoral program in architectural history, theory, and criticism before joining the faculty at Rensselaer. Chris is a co-recipient of the Architectural League's Young Architects Award and co-guest editor of AD: Collective Intelligence in Design (Wiley-Academy, 2006), and with Cathryn Dwyre co-editor of a special issue of PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art (MIT Press, 2015). Previously, Chris was the Louis I. Kahn Visiting Assistant Professor at the School of Architecture at Yale University, an endowed professorship, and a principal of the experimental design practice servo, which exhibited and published extensively between 1999 and 2010. David Salomon is Associate Professor of Art History at Ithaca College where he serves as Coordinator of the Architectural Studies program. David has taught studios and seminars at the Universidad Torcuato DiTella in Buenos Aires, the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell University, Syracuse University, and the University at Buffalo. His scholarship focuses on everyday environments and aesthetics. He is the author of the book Symmetry: The One and the Many (DiTella, 2018) and co-author of The Architecture of Patterns (Norton, 2010). His research has appeared in the journals Grey Room, Log, Harvard Design Magazine, New Territories, Places, The Journal of Landscape Architecture, LA+, and the Journal of Architectural Education, on topics ranging from the relationship between Land Art and suburbia, Minimal Art and the supermarket, the aesthetic function of infrastructure, and the presence of modern axis mundi in the techno-scientific landscape. Kathy Velikov is Professor and Associate Dean for Research and Creative Practice at the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, and Vice-President of ACADIA. She is a licensed architect and founding partner of the practice RVTR, which serves as a platform for exploration and experimentation in the intertwinements between architecture, the environment, technology, and sociopolitics. Her work ranges from prototypes that explore architectural skins which mediate matter, energy, information, space, and atmosphere between bodies and environments, to the investigation of urban infrastructures and territorial practices, using mapping and analysis, speculative design propositions, physical prototyping, exhibitions, and writing. Kathy is a recipient of the Architectural League's Young Architects Award, the Canadian Professional Prix de Rome in Architecture, and co-author of the book Infra Eco Logi Urbanism (Park Books, 2015). Her work has been awarded and exhibited internationally, and her writing has been published in edited books and journals. Catherine Ingraham is a Full Professor in the Graduate Program of Architecture at Pratt Institute, a program which she chaired from 1999-2005. She also has been a Visiting Faculty member at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, since 2016. Ingraham earned her Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University and was an editor, with Michael Hays and Alicia Kennedy, of the critical journal Assemblage. Ingraham has lectured at multiple national and international schools of architecture and published widely in journals and book collections. Her books include Architecture, Animal, Human (Routledge Press, London 2006), and Architecture and The Burdens of Linearity (Yale University Press, New Haven 1998). She is currently working on two books, Architecture, Property and the Pursuit of Happiness and Worlds Between. Ingraham has won numerous fellowships and awards, including the Canadian Center for Architecture Fellowship, Graham Foundation grants, and MacDowell Colony residencies. Peder Anker's teaching and research interests lie in the history of science, ecology, environmentalism, design, and environmental philosophy. He is the author of From Bauhaus to Eco-House: A History of Ecological Design (Louisiana State University Press, 2010), which explores the intersection of architecture and ecological science, and Imperial Ecology: Environmental Order in the British Empire, 1895-1945 (Harvard University Press, 2001), which investigates how the promising new science of ecology flourished in the British Empire. Anker's latest book explores the history of ecological debates in his country of birth, Norway, The Power of the Periphery: How Norway Became an Environmental Pioneer for the World (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Anker received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1999. He is Professor of History of Science at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University.

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