Immersive video presentation celebrates and examines landscape architects

No field can advance unless it incorporates a process of critical self-examination. Members of The Cultural Landscape Foundation will see an example of this as they gather at the Hunt Library—not just because of an agenda item, but because of an immersive scholarship presentation by Special Collections Research Center research assistant Lindsey Naylor.

Naylor’s video slide presentation, “Midcentury Landscape Architecture through the Work of Four Practitioners,” will run continuously in the Hunt Library’s iPearl Immersion Theater throughout the day on April 13, and will then be on heavy rotation among that space’s other exhibits. The video looks back at midcentury landscape architectural practice through the lens of the NCSU Libraries Landscape Architecture Archive by sharing maps, drawings and images from the archival collections of Lewis Clarke, Richard Moore, Richard Bell and R. D. Tillson.

Naylor, a Landscape Architecture graduate student at the College of Design, sheds light on that transformational moment in landscape architecture and on issues—social, environmental and technological—that continue to drive the profession today.

She notes the environmental and aesthetic concerns within Clarke’s innovative mapping techniques, as well as how Moore extended them by overlaying economic data onto the landscape. Naylor also shows how Bell’s concern about urban sprawl, which led him to embrace ecological design, as well as how Tillson's career—from the public parks of the New Deal era to the midcentury razing of communities through urban renewal—spans the highs and lows of landscape architecture and public design.

Naylor’s iPearl Immersion Theater exhibit caps off a successful two-year appointment with the Special Collections Research Center, in which she completed numerous projects that support the development and growth of the Landscape Architecture Archive.