The New York artist Mary Miss has proposed building a 1,500-foot bridge across a canal at a new 100-acre art and nature park for the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Miss is working with the New York structural engineer Guy Nordenson on developing the bridge as an innovative viewing device-a central platform for walking across, surrounded on either side with ha-ha's, or walkways depressed 42 inches that form a sort of moat, which visitors can occupy along the bridge's length. Imagine a "W" section through the bridge, with a wider center peak as the main path. The idea is to confront the viewer with nature, lessening the force of architecture by making such things as handrails effectively disappear.
"I'm trying to get people to notice what they take for granted in a landscape, to reveal multiple aspects of the site," Miss says. "The bridge seems to be a platform with no edges-I want you to feel free to see this place as you've never seen it before." In the 1970s, the art historian and critic Rosalind Krauss placed the work of artists like Miss in a new conceptual framework of practice, in an expanded field that included "site construction." For Krauss, these artists did not work in the conventions of sculpture, but in a category that existed between traditional notions of landscape, architecture, and sculpture.
An increasing number of architects and designers embrace this notion of site development-spanning between the traditional roles of architect and landscape architect-embedding a variety of interpretations of site conditions into a new performance-based architecture of sustainable principles. But an architect must be interested enough in this new scope of opportunity, in areas such as groundwater-recharge and wastewater-treatment design, since it falls outside traditional practice.
The site of the Indianapolis project lies within an elbow of the White River, which runs from north to south, looping around the western edge of the park. A 35-acre lake, the legacy of a quarry mined to build a nearby highway, occupies the park. A canal dating to the 19th century slices the site off from the main museum building on a bluff to the east. The new park lies in a 100-year floodplain, though the park's landscape architect, Ed Blake, wonders if the impact of global warming doesn't make such considerations for a site as utterly dynamic as this one a little bit useless. Blake's approach is not to keep water out, but to understand how it will travel.
"I'm trying to get people to notice what they take for granted in a landscape, to reveal multiple aspects of the site," Miss says. "The bridge seems to be a platform with no edges-I want you to feel free to see this place as you've never seen it before." In the 1970s, the art historian and critic Rosalind Krauss placed the work of artists like Miss in a new conceptual framework of practice, in an expanded field that included "site construction." For Krauss, these artists did not work in the conventions of sculpture, but in a category that existed between traditional notions of landscape, architecture, and sculpture.
An increasing number of architects and designers embrace this notion of site development-spanning between the traditional roles of architect and landscape architect-embedding a variety of interpretations of site conditions into a new performance-based architecture of sustainable principles. But an architect must be interested enough in this new scope of opportunity, in areas such as groundwater-recharge and wastewater-treatment design, since it falls outside traditional practice.
The site of the Indianapolis project lies within an elbow of the White River, which runs from north to south, looping around the western edge of the park. A 35-acre lake, the legacy of a quarry mined to build a nearby highway, occupies the park. A canal dating to the 19th century slices the site off from the main museum building on a bluff to the east. The new park lies in a 100-year floodplain, though the park's landscape architect, Ed Blake, wonders if the impact of global warming doesn't make such considerations for a site as utterly dynamic as this one a little bit useless. Blake's approach is not to keep water out, but to understand how it will travel.
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