Ambiguous Territory

Ambiguous Territory brings together the work of over forty architects, landscape architects, artists, and historians engaged in an exploration of art and design's place in a time of environmental uncertainty and existential threat.

Conceived in both environmental and disciplinary terms, the concept of 'ambiguous territory' seeks to define conditions of uncertainty between nature and culture as well as architecture, art, and landscape. Ambiguous Territory advances the argument that it is through such forms of transdisciplinary practice that new opportunities emerge for creative thinking about our changing relationship to the Earth.

What stories can art and design tell about the effects of global warming and its fundamental reordering of our perceived distinction between nature and culture? Ambiguous Territory brings together the work of architects, landscape architects, artists, and historians to present stories and depictions of a postnatural world and its effects of alienation on traditional forms of identity and meaning.

Initially staged as an exhibition and related symposium at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan before traveling to the Elmaleh Gallery at the University of Virginia, Pratt Manhattan Gallery, and Handwerker Gallery at Ithaca College, the work included in this volume can be seen to engage estrangement as a productive site of intellectual and creative potential. Resisting at once naive optimism and cynical pessimism about the place of art and design in a time of environmental uncertainty and existential threat, Ambiguous Territory explores a opportunities for creative thinking and aesthetic practices that question as well as reinvent our relationship to the Earth, enabling us to see things anew, or simply to probe where we might be heading. Out of what kind of fog? Into what kind of New World?