American Wild: Digital Preservation for Changing Landscapes

Abstract

The National Park Service represents the nation's largest initiative in landscape conservation and preservation. As both a material and cultural construct, national parks are living memorials to a uniquely American wilderness narrative. In celebration of the National Park Service Centennial, American Wild is a speculative proposal for digital landscape preservation. The project generates civic pride by connecting the distinctive architecture of the Washington, DC Metro to the national parks. Using ultra–high-definition recordings, videos of each park are individually projection-mapped at full scale. The memorial creates a timeline of the National Park Service's 100-year history that advocates for its next centennial.

Notes

1 The National Association for Olmsted Parks, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the US National Park Service (NPS), and Parks Canada have all significantly contributed to the practice and discourse of natural and cultural landscape preservation in North America.

2 For an in-depth examination of the American conception of “wilderness,” see Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967). For an expanded environmental history of the United States that challenges culturally dominant American histories and conceptualizations of nature and environment, see works by Carolyn Merchant, William Cronon, and Donald Worster.

3 An Act to Establish a National Park Service, And for Other Purposes, approved August 25, 1916 (39 Stat. 535).

4 Wilderness Act of 1964, (Pub.L. 88–577).

5 Douglas Anderson references “Walking” for Thoreau's use of “wildness” as a political gesture toward freedom and dissent in “Wildness as Political Act,” The Personalist Forum 14 (1998): 65–72. On the challenges of defining “wilderness,” see Craig DeLancey, “An Ecological Concept of Wilderness,” Ethics and the Environment 17, no. 1 (2012): 25–44. In landscape architectural discourse, see the themed issue, Tatum Hands, ed., WILD, LA+: Interdisciplinary Journal of Landscape Architecture (Spring 2015).

6 Both textual and visual methods of representation have contributed to the significant narratives of the American environmental imaginary and national parks. For canonical textual accounts see works by Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Frederick Jackson Turner, and Gifford Pinchot. These narratives have emerged in the agendas and legal legacies of various presidents and political leaders.

7 Kevin Michael DeLuca and Anne Teresa Demos, “Imaging Nature: Watkins, Yosemite, and the Birth of Environmentalism,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 17 (2000): 241–60.

8 Richard A. Grusin, Culture, Technology, and the Creation of America's National Parks (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 10.

9 See J. Scott Bryson and Carolyn Merchant, “Partnership, Narrative, and Environmental Justice: An Interview with Carolyn Merchant,” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 3, no. 1 (Spring 2001), 124–30.

10 The Trump administration has targeted the removal of public and environmental protections for resource extraction.

11 Robert Z. Melnick, “Climate Change and Landscape Preservation: A Twenty-First–Century Conundrum,” Journal of Preservation Technology 40, no. 3/4 (2009): 35–42.

12 Bob Marshall to Secretary Harold L. Ickes, “Suggested Program for Preservation of Wilderness Areas,” memo, April 1934, record group 79, National Archives, Washington, DC.

13 NPS, “Annual Visitation Highlights,” US Department of the Interior, accessed May 2018, https://www.nps.gov/subjects/socialscience/annual-visitation-highlights.htm.

14 P. A. Taylor, B. D. Grandjean, and B. Anatchkova, National Park Service Comprehensive Survey of the American Public, 2008–2009, Natural Resource Report NPS/NRPC/SSD/NRR, (Fort Collins, Colorado: National Park Service, 2011), 295.

15 NPS, press release, January 27, 2016, US Department of the Interior, accessed May 2018, https://www.nps.gov/aboutus/news/release.htm?id=1775.

16 Terry Tempest Williams, The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America's National Parks (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2016), 11.

17 Jedidiah Purdy, After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 22–23.

18 William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 69.

19 Zachary Schrag, The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).

20 Rem Koolhaas, “Preservation Is Overtaking Us,” Future Anterior 1, no. 2 (2004):

21 xiv, 1–3.

22 Robert Z. Melnick, “Climate Change and Landscape Preservation: Rethinking Our Strategies,” Change Over Time 5, no. 2, (2015): 174–79; and Robert Z. Melnick, “Deciphering Cultural Landscape Heritage in the Time of Climate Change,” Landscape Journal 35 (2016): 287–302.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Forbes Lipschitz

Author Biographies

Forbes Lipschitz is an assistant professor of landscape architecture at the Austin E. Knowlton School of Architecture at The Ohio State University. As a faculty affiliate for the Initiative in Food and AgriCultural Transformation, her current research investigates the potential of design to improve the social and ecological dynamics of conventional working landscapes. She has been awarded teaching and research grants from the Louisiana State University Office of Research and Development, the Coastal Sustainability Studio, and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in Fine Arts. Her professional experience in landscape architecture has spanned a range of public, private, and infrastructural work, including a multiyear installation at Les Jardins de Metis.

Halina Steiner

Halina Steiner is an assistant professor of landscape architecture at the Austin E. Knowlton School of Architecture at The Ohio State University (OSU). Her current research focuses on the visualization of transboundary hydrologic and infrastructure systems. Prior to her appointment at OSU, Steiner served as the design director for DLANDstudio Architecture + Landscape Architecture where she was the project manager for master planning, green infrastructure, temporary installations, and public design projects. This work included Paths to Pier 42, a three-year pop-up park to activate underused waterfront space impacted by Superstorm Sandy, Public Media Commons, The QueensWay Plan, and HOLD System.

Shelby Doyle

Shelby Doyle, AIA, is an assistant professor of architecture and Daniel J. Huberty Faculty Fellow at the Iowa State University (ISU) College of Design. Her scholarship is broadly focused on the intersection of computation and construction and specifically on the role of digital craft as both a social and political project. Doyle was hired under the High Impact Hires Initiative to combine digital fabrication and design-build at ISU. This led to the founding of the ISU Computation + Construction Lab with Nick Senske and Leslie Forehand.

Justine Holzman

Justine Holzman joined the University of Toronto's Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design in January 2018 as an assistant professor of landscape architecture teaching visual communication, site technologies, and studio courses. Additionally, Holzman is a member of the Dredge Research Collaborative and a research affiliate for the Responsive Environments and Artifacts Lab at Harvard University Graduate School of Design. She is coauthor of Responsive Landscapes: Strategies for Responsive Technologies in Landscape Architecture (2016) with Bradley Cantrell. Holzman previously taught at The University of Tennessee and The Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture at Louisiana State University where she worked as a research fellow with the Coastal Sustainability Studio.