Landscape Architecture Students Reimagine the World in a Glass

Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Theatre of The World) was the title of the world’s first atlas, produced in 16th-century Antwerp. The Landscape Architecture students in Department Chair Richard Weller's Culture of Nature course this semester took their cue from this landmark publication to make an artwork exploring the idea of the ‘world as theatre.’ 

Students were asked to base their work on a quotation (below) from a 1990 exhibition entitled Artificial Nature at the Deste Foundation in Athens that observed the increasing conversion of the natural environment into the artificial in contemporary society. The other constraint was that the work be constructed using a glass terrarium the size of an everyday brandy snifter.

"Because terrariums are artificial worlds which often use ‘natural’ materials, they have an unmistakable artificiality, making them excellent conceptual signifiers of today’s landscape," explains Weller.

The exhibition is on view in Dean's Alley at Meyerson Hall, 210 South 34th Street, through Saturday, December 5.

1. Nature has traditionally been the ultimate inspiration and challenge for the artist who, depending on his or her orientation sought to imitate it improve upon it or interpret it.

2. Not only have artists studied nature for centuries they have also looked to it for the revelation of basic truths. An immersion in nature gave artists, scientists, and philosophers a deeper picture of reality.

3. Renderings of nature always tend to spiritualize it, romanticize it or intellectualize it.

4. The natural world has never before been overrun with the kind of artificiality that now permeates it but one’s conception of it has always been a man-made construct.

5. The development of Cubism and geometric abstraction coincided with the opening of a whole new universe of knowledge through the field of theoretical physics and its applications.

6. Nature is less and less the mysterious nourishing force that emerged with the birth of the universe and more and more something that we are re-creating ourselves.

7. From the greenhouse effect to the green revolution that has spawned supercharged strains of grains and vegetables, nature is being reconstituted.

8. Nature is more often than not something to be experienced on television or on a club med vacation. Nature is increasingly an artificial experience.

9. A truly contemporary artist might be better advised to seek truth in nature in a strip mine of in the visitor’s center of a game preserve.

10. To immerse oneself in nature today is to immerse oneself in layers of chaotic exploitation.

11. Genuine nature may now be more artificial than natural. The jungle ride at Disney may in fact be more real to most people than the real jungle in the Amazon.

12. The temptation to use the rapid advances in biotechnology to genetically “improve” our offspring could prove to be irresistible.

13. We could find the world divided into two classes of people: “new improved” humans in the wealthier countries, living in a seamless, artificially enhanced environment, and old humans still struggling with the vicissitudes of “natural” nature. 

14. Plastic surgeons, farm managers and real estate developers and all kinds of ordinary people are now making aesthetic decisions that only artists and architects once made.

15. More and more people are becoming more comfortable in the simulated world than in the real one.

16. An ever-increasing percentage of our world is covered by the same depleted almost characterless landscape that is neither rural nor urban.

17. The environment has become so artificial that he traditional aspiration of the artist to reveal the truth in what he or she sees may have become impossible.

18. The exploding technology of computer science and artificial intelligence along with the advances in biological science may bring as strong a degree of change in the way we live as did the airplane and the automobile.

19. As modern art paralleled the direction of science and industry in its explorations of the basic structures of natural materials and systems, the advanced art of the next century will most likely reflect the new world created by the synthesis of new life forms.

20. With the emphasis on image rather than substance in communications and in the marketing of everything from automobiles to politicians, the traditional search for truth has perhaps become obsolete.

21. There is no longer one absolute reality but the possibility of multiple realities each one as real or as artificial as the others.

22. On the one side there is the pessimistic view that we have nearly depleted our natural resources and are on the verge of destroying what’s left of our forests and our atmosphere. Then there is the optimistic argument that our advancing technology will allow us to construct a complex life support system.