April 30, 2009
ITHACA, NY — In April, the Cornell University campus was host to a unique exercise in a site-specific art installation, the Field project, a continuous and homogenous presentation of 2,800 red sacks filled with straw that covered the entire Arts Quad. The sacks were distributed in a 10 feet by 10 feet grid following the natural slope of the ground surface. The installation was an optical exercise extended into a landscape format.“This is a monumental installation with multiple elements arranged in a regular formation,” said co-organizer Yehre Suh, visiting critic in the Cornell Department of Architecture. “The project examined the formal properties of agricultural fields in reference to the past and current history of the Cornell campus.”
The Field project could be read as an overlap between the original morphology of the cultivated lands and an idealized and abstract pattern of Cartesian knowledge. In this sense, the presence of the installation had the capacity of reclaiming the centrality of the Arts Quad’s openness with an expansive, inclusive, and non-hierarchical spatial structure.
“The Field project is a visual reconstruction of an idealized productive landscape in the sense that it establishes the superimposition of a mechanical pattern onto the natural geography,” said Mauricio Pezo, Baird Visiting Critic in architecture.
The installation was built on April 11 and remained in place until April 14. This project was sponsored by the Department of Architecture in the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning (AAP) at Cornell University and was directed by Suh, Pezo, and and Sofia von Ellrichshausen Baird Visiting Critic in architecture. The trio was assisted by more than 40 Cornell architecture students.
Collaborators
Sae-Jun Ahn, Laura Amaya, Jesica Bello, John Best, Irina Chernyakova, Constanza Cortes, Karen Drummund, Monica Alexandra Freundt, Thea von Geldern, Lisa Hollywood, Amanda Lee Huang, Soyoung Jung, Kyle Keene, Jina Kim, Viola Diane Kosseda, Weonyoung Joy Lee, Chris Leonberg, Timothy Liddell, Jacqueline Liu, Hana Ovcina, Mia Ovcina, Mansi Ajit Pandey, Anna Pelavin, Hilary Pinnington, Mitchell W. Pride, Lorena Quintana, Ashley Reed, Samuel J. Reilly, Landon Gary Robinson, Hira Sabuhi, Johann Schweig, Courtney Song, Jerome Soustra, Rachel Tan, Margarita Urquiza, Mauricio Vieto, Zhiqiang Wang, Christopher Werner, Sonny Meng Qi Xu, Soo Jung Yoo, Milena Zindovic
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