I am pleased to share some thoughts about an inspiring presentation I attended at the ASLA Meeting in Denver last fall. “Claiming Territories: Signifying Art and Design in the Landscape,” was hosted by Thomas Woltz (Nelson Byrd Woltz) and Mikyoung Kim (Mikyoung Kim Design). The designers introduced several projects that have an artistic approach toward landscape, as well as installation art with a landscape attitude.
Two projects stood out for their range in scale: Orongo Station Conservation master plan, by Nelson Byrd Woltz, and Dulles Airport: the Pendulum Project, by Mikyoung Kim Design. The first is of such a tremendous scale that it can hardly be controlled by human forces, while the second is embedded so deeply into the viewer’s sensorial experience it might actually be ignored.
Orongo Station is a habitat restoration project in New Zealand. Its flowing form looks like an artful work of nature. But in fact, it is highly designed. Woltz visited the site many times, riding his motorcycle up into the hills again and again to observe its curvature and elevation, and adjusting his design to create suitable habitats for different species. Perhaps surprisingly, the tremendous piece of land art works exactly as he intended, with expected habitats having indeed been created in different spots and more and more species colonizing the site based on its design. This project represents a big step for ecological landscape, beginning from academic research and beautiful drawings to a real project that has been controlled and executed. A profound understanding of the evolving site was key to its success, with every single line in the drawings requiring continual adjustment based on an accumulated understanding of topography, weather, water movement and the overall ecological cycle.
Mikyoung Kim’s Pendulum Project reflects a different scale entirely. It is a piece of installation art defining a corridor in Dulles airport—two facing lenticular resin walls covered in local and global scenes that resonate with the viewer’s sensory experiences about time, motion, and light when travelling. Here, the natural landscape has been translated into a piece of art. Information is condensed by the designer and shown to the public via a striking and vivid form. While the boundaries between landscape and art have been blurred, the designer’s image selection process was carried out from a landscape perspective. When asked about her working process, Kim responds: “Sometimes we build mockups out of foamcore in-house to envision the scale, and sometimes fabricators build them in their shop and we assess the work there. Many of our commissions are quite constrained in their budget. We are always balancing budget with the quality of the work.”
Photo by Alan Karchmer, courtesy of Mikyoung Kim Design.
