Roosevelt

Landscape history is often cast as a specialized undertaking, an accessory activity removed from the innovative concerns of contemporary design practice. This collaborative university research project challenges that assumption using a series of case studies to illustrate how historical research can function as both a cross-disciplinary fact-finding activity that selects and organizes information, and a revelatory action that shapes our vision of the land. The case studies inventively blend archival historiography, popular culture, oral histories, science, and big data using timeline chronologies, montage juxtaposition, and network linkages. The resultant products raise intriguing questions about the way designers translate, prioritize and combine cross-disciplinary knowledge in order to create new patterns of inference.