Ambiguous Territory: Architecture, Landscape, and the Postnatural
Symposium, exhibition, and book organized, curated, and edited by Cathryn Dwyre, Chris Perry, David Salomon, and Kathy Velikov.
Ambiguous Territory, an exhibition and symposium that brings together over sixty works of art, architecture, landscape architecture, and scholarship, was first launched at the University of Michigan in 2017, with subsequent exhibitions and related events at the University of Virginia in 2018, the Pratt Manhattan Gallery in 2018-19, and the Handwerker Gallery at Ithaca College in 2019-20.
The Ambiguous Territory book features the content of the exhibition and symposium, along with a foreword by architectural historian Catherine Ingraham and an afterword by science historian Peder Anker, and was published by Actar Publishers in 2022 with a launch event at Rizzoli Bookstore in New York.
The writers and designers in this collection are among the most thoughtful architects, artists, landscape architects, and theorists working today. The editors organized these essays and works of art and design around three territories: the atmospheric, the biologic, and the geologic. Each cluster of essays is further framed by forewords and afterwords, which draw individual points of view into a larger articulation of what an ambiguous territory might be and how it operates. Ambiguous Territory emerged from a symposium and exhibition held at the University of Michigan in the fall of 2017, and exhibitions at the University of Virginia and Pratt Manhattan Gallery in 2018, and at Ithaca College in 2019. The conversations that arise in this book are inquisitive and critically engaged. They pressure assumptions we routinely make about what constitutes meaningful and principled perspectives in architecture, landscape architecture, and art. Both the texts and the work take on some of the trickiest issues of our time.
Excerpt from a foreword to the book by Catherine Ingraham
Professor, Graduate Architecture and Urban Design, Pratt Institute
The works in Ambiguous Territory exist in a creative space, in the moody realm of possibilities. It’s a sphere of design in which solutions (or lack thereof) have yet to settle. That should be a familiar feeling for all creative people, whose daily life may include exploring a way out of a problem without being able to nail down an exact answer. This volume belongs in that territory of ambiguity and curiosity, a place where there is room for musings, laughter, and despair. The projects convey, in different ways, a hope for a better future, but also a sense of not knowing if that future is at all possible.
Excerpt from an afterword to the book by Peder Anker
Professor, the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University
Ambiguous Territory book published by Actar:
https://actar.com/product/ambiguous-territory/
Rizzoli Bookstore launch event:
https://www.rizzolibookstore.com/news/ambiguous-territory-architecture-landscape-and-postnatural
Pratt Manhattan Gallery exhibition review in Architect’s Newspaper: https://archpaper.com/2019/01/pratt-manhattan-gallery-ambiguous-territory/#gallery-0-slide-0
Pratt Manhattan Gallery round table event: https://www.pratt.edu/events/event/14530/
University of Michigan symposium: https://taubmancollege.umich.edu/events/2017/10/05/symposium-ambiguous-territory-architecture-landscape-and-postnatural
