Please join us in the Atrium as Assistant Professor Jane Hutton launches her book, Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements.
How
are
the
far-away,
invisible
landscapes
where
materials
come
from
related
to
the
highly
visible,
urban
landscapes
where those
same
materials
are
installed?
Reciprocal
Landscapes:
Stories
of
Material
Movements
traces
five
everyday
landscape construction
materials
–
fertilizer,
stone,
steel,
trees,
and
wood
–
from
seminal
public
landscapes
in
New
York
City,
back
to where
they
came
from.
Drawing
from
archival
documents,
photographs,
and
field
trips,
the
author
brings
these
two
separate
landscapes
–
the material’s
source
and
the
urban
site
where
the
material
ended
up
–
together,
exploring
themes
of
unequal
ecological exchange,
labor,
and
material
flows.
Each
chapter
follows
a
single
material’s
movement:
guano
from
Peru
that
landed
in Central
Park
in
the
1860s,
granite
from
Maine
that
paved
Broadway
in
the
1890s,
structural
steel
from
Pittsburgh
that restructured
Riverside
Park
in
the
1930s,
London
plane
street
trees
grown
on
Rikers
Island
by
incarcerated
workers
that were
planted
on
Seventh
Avenue
north
of
Central
Park
in
the
1950s,
and
the
popular
tropical
hardwood,
ipe,
from
northern Brazil
installed
in
the
High
Line
in
the
2000s.
Reciprocal
Landscapes:
Stories
of
Material
Movements
considers
the
social,
political,
and
ecological
entanglements
of material
practice,
challenging
readers
to
think
of
materials
not
as
inert
products
but
as
continuous
with
land
and
the
people that
shape
them,
and
to
reimagine
forms
of
construction
in
solidarity
with
people,
other
species,
and
landscapes
elsewhere.