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Exhibit at OSU Urban Arts Space tackles notions of landmark and landscape

Posted on | November 18, 2009 | 2,104 views |

By Julia Harris

Ask your average Columbus citizen what the city’s landmark sites and structures are and you’re likely to get a furrowed look in return.

And then the usual suspects will pop up: LeVeque Tower, the Statehouse, maybe the full-scale replica of the Santa Maria, definitely the iconic Ohio Stadium.

What you’re not likely to hear mentioned are places like “The Gates of Hell,” a rugged urban hollow beneath High Street full of graffiti and mythology, or the “Salt Mountain,” a shifting elevation of road salt stored north of I-670.

But to Sarah Cowles, assistant professor of landscape architecture at the Knowlton School of Architecture, these desolate and obscure sites comprise a system of monuments just as telling — if not more so — about the character and culture of Columbus. The story they tell is the subject and substance of the exhibit “The Monuments of Columbus, Ohio,” curated by Cowles and on view at the OSU Urban Arts Space through Dec. 12.

In the exhibit are photos, mappings, physical constructions and dioramas of several abandoned or outlying sites in and around Columbus, primarily created by students in a seminar Cowles taught last winter.

“The exhibit is a sort of debut, if you will, of the kind of work I am bringing to the school and of the kinds of projects that show how we’re thinking about sites and the Midwest.”

No one brings a keener eye to the Midwestern landscape than Cowles, a relatively recent transplant from San Francisco who first became interested in the “underground” landscape of Columbus while touring her new home on her bicycle.

“There are lots of named places and geography in Columbus, like Goodale Park and the Short North and Highbanks, but then there’s this whole unnamed landscape that is much more fascinating to me because it’s totally overlooked, unstewarded and maybe unsafe,” Cowles said.

It was a dim day and her concrete-walled Knowlton office was as gray as the sky — a surrounding she calls, cheerfully, “brutal” and “macho.” The ruggedness of the setting seems particularly appropriate given her recent adventures roaming and photographing the broken concrete slabs that litter an old railroad yard.

“There’s a really wonderful ruin behind the Lifestyles Community Pavilion; I think it used to be an old homeless encampment,” she said, her eyes gleaming.

“One of my favorite places is a big slab of concrete that’s cracked in the middle so that it collects water; it’s actually become a wetland there with cattails, all kinds of birds, berries and apples. It’s its own underground geography.”

To create the works shown in the exhibit, Cowles’ students first had to choose from among 14 hand-picked sites and spend time exploring, documenting, photographing and generating works of art around that site.

In addition to “The Gates of Hell,” students could choose to explore the old Columbus Coated Fabrics factory site, quarries that were no longer being mined, various gritty urban sites and Oho State’s own Olentangy River Wetlands Research Park.

Cowles smiled. “I learned a lot about the psychology of sending students to abandoned sites in the city. There was either intense curiosity and wonder, or fear and terror for others.”

Courtney Keys, a master’s student in landscape architecture, was one of the former and admits she lucked out in her choice of site, a quarry near the Scioto River that has not been mined in 10 years.

“When I got down in it, I honestly felt like I was completely removed from Columbus and back out west, experiencing the type of sublimity you feel when you’re looking at a Rocky Mountain cliff,” said Keys, herself a former California resident.

“There’s a beautiful succession happening where everything is starting to grow over, and it no longer looks like a post-industrial site. You have these elements of danger, sheer rocky cliffs where the rocks are still somewhat unstable, but then you turn and see prairie-like grasses, and then you turn and see wet meadow… All these different landscapes in one place.”

For Cowles (who admits she spent a good part of her summer swimming in that very quarry), the post-industrial landscape of Columbus is immensely interesting.

“So many factories or industrial sites were shut down and left toxins in the soil, so there’s a lot of reclamation going on,” she said.

“Like with the former coated fabrics factory, where they took the whole site, scraped it clean and put it in a big pile. It’s like a big tomb, like a tomb of the former industrial heart of Columbus.”

IF YOU GO

“The Monuments of Columbus, Ohio” runs through Dec. 12 at the OSU Urban Arts Space, 50 W. Town Street. Hours are Tues.-Sat. 11 a.m.-6 p.m., Thurs. 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Call 292-8861 for info or visit their Web site, uas.osu.edu.

WHAT EXACTLY IS LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE?

“I think there’s a common misconception that we pick out plants for other people’s yards, and it’s really quite a bit beyond that,” said Courtney Keys, a master’s student in landscape architecture at Knowlton.

So what do they do, exactly?

“We’re not building buildings, but we’re doing everything in between,” said Sarah Cowles, assistant professor of landscape architecture. “It’s often called a synthetic discipline because we put everything together: We deal with infrastructure, we deal with accessibility, we deal with ecology. We have all these worlds we pull from, and we build the landscape.”

Often called “the invisible profession,” landscape architecture is defined by Wickipedia as “the design of outdoor and public spaces to achieve environmental, socio-behavioral, and/or aesthetic outcomes. It involves the systematic investigation of existing social, ecological, and geological conditions and processes in the landscape, and the design of interventions that will produce the desired outcome.”

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