As part of the "Architecture v. Landscape: Terms of Engagement" seminar, faculty from Architecture and Landscape Architecture sections of the Knowlton School of Architecture will be making presentations on the topic of "Ground", framing the overlaps and divergences between how the respective disciplines of Architecture and Landscape Architecture position themselves relative to the concept of "ground" - as literal circumstance and conceptual image.

Presentations include:

Jeffrey Kipnis, Architecture KSA
"from datum to metropolitan field: the vicissitudes of contemporary architecture's relation to the ground"

Sarah Cowles, Landscape Architecture KSA
"Fence, Ditch, Repeat"

Karen Lewis, Architecture KSA
"Action Plans"

Moderators:
Jane Amidon, Head Landscape Architecture Section
John McMorrough, Head Architecture Section

The symposium is this Friday, October 30, 2009, from 10:30am to 12:00pm in the Knowlton Hall Review Space, and is open to all members of the KSA and OSU community.

The proceedings of this symposium, as well as all other sessions of the seminar can be found at the Open KSA website: http://knowlton.osu.edu/open/media.asp, as well as at the Ohio State University / Knowlton School of Architecture iTunesU podcast listings.

The history of architecture and landscape architecture has found itself sustained in a series of analogies (the list is extensive: between architecture and film, and music, and philosophy, etc.; between landscape and poetry, and literature, and painting, etc.  The list goes on). In this era of increasing convergence in the realm of design, in both cross-disciplinary borrowings and the pursuit of common interest, the tacit agreements that underwrite such efforts are often premised on these mutual misunderstandings (mis-readings?) of terms held as self-evident. While such crossed signals have the benefit of facile agreements, is it at the cost of specificity and actual meaning? In the current moment, the relationship between the particularities of landscape and those of building, in light of both environmental and institutional issues, are particularly germane. Whether addressing issues of sustainability, or how to envision a common curriculum at the Knowlton School, the question of what terms define these engagements is key. To explore this congruence and discontinuity, a definition of terms is in order, less with an interest in defining propriety, but rather in establishing provenance, and therein potential.