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While researching the history of Green Hall and its surrounding landscape, I encountered architectural drawings of the building’s 1999 redesign. I was struck by how abstractly plants were represented amid the specificity of the drawings’ primarily geometric forms. Though this abstraction is likely common practice — as a site’s socio-environmental context and landscaping often seem to be an afterthought — I found parallels in strands of research on maps and topography, the porousness of surfaces and agency of living materials, deconstructing human/nature binaries through interspecies interfaces, multiplicity, deep time and artifacts of environmental histories.
While researching the history of Green Hall and its surrounding landscape, I encountered architectural drawings of the building’s 1999 redesign. I was struck by how abstractly plants were represented amid the specificity of the drawings’ primarily geometric forms. Though this abstraction is likely common practice — as a site’s socio-environmental context and landscaping often seem to be an afterthought — I found parallels in strands of research on maps and topography, the porousness of surfaces and agency of living materials, deconstructing human/nature binaries through interspecies interfaces, multiplicity, deep time and artifacts of environmental histories.
Location of Existing is a site-specific installation that subverts forms utilized in urban planning by flipping the foreground and background from the built to the grown. Life size drawings intervene on their surrounding environment’s conditions and history, offering a new perspective on everyday spaces. Reframing, deconstructing, perforating, Location of Existing weaves a loose narrative between the speculative and the real, architectural and archaeological, and the growth and decay of our built environment.
Location of Existing
2021
Green Hall, Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT
Laser print on water soluble paper
Produced with Jeemin Shim
Sources include architectural drawings by Deborah Berke, writing by Renee Gladman, and a lecture by Maren Karlson
2021
Green Hall, Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT
Laser print on water soluble paper
Produced with Jeemin Shim
Sources include architectural drawings by Deborah Berke, writing by Renee Gladman, and a lecture by Maren Karlson