The Hawksmoor International Open Lecture Series

Jane Hutton
Reciprocal Landscapes: Sites of Material Exchange

• Thursday 26th February 2015 > 6.30pm
• Tessa Blackstone Lecture Theatre [11_0003]

Landscapes are shaped by continuous flows of materials driven by anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic forces. Designers participate in this massive reorganization of materials around the earth, the majority of which is bound for varying periods of time as urban parks, farms, buildings, and highways. In landscape architecture, these materials range from abiotic to biotic composition, from simple to complex manufacturing processes, and from local to distance sources. While materials are selected for ecological, structural, and aesthetic performance characteristics desired for a particular designed site, their production is linked to a network of distant forests, quarries, and factories. Through specification, designers inadvertently transform remote landscapes, concealed and abstracted through the commodification of natural resources. Reciprocal Landscapes examines a set of paradigmatic construction materials installed in seminal, designed landscapes in New York City over the past century and a half. Each case explores the ecological, social, and political relationships between two sites tethered by the displacement of a material between them.

Jane Hutton is a landscape architect and Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she is Co-Director of the Energy, Environments, and Design research lab. Hutton is a founding editor of the journal Scapegoat: Architecture, Landscape, Political Economy.