Faculty First Year Seminars 197ARC1 - Art of Infrastructure: Nature

The Art of Infrastructure: Nature and the Art of What Sustains Us? explores the historical and social background behind the segregation of nature and infrastructure. Via landscape paintings, landscape architecture and writings from the 17th through the 20th Centuries students will investigate why American society has become so divorced from the infrastructure that sustains it. In the 19th and 20th Centuries, infrastructure such as the railroad, factories, power stations ? even animal husbandry ? became excluded from our views of the landscape. Similarly, nature became something separate from our daily lives, an untouched wilderness. Students examine these shifts and the recent efforts of architects, artists, planners and engineers to reintegrate infrastructure projects into our landscape. Through a historical lens, students will study how and why our views of nature have shifted and the positive efforts underway to reintegrate nature and infrastructure into our communities.

Freshmen Only