Coolidge coming to town

Thanks to Larry Giles for the heads up on this. We met Coolidge in Chicago last year and were very impressed with his work, which corresponds nicely to our own.

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Looking for St. Louis

Matthew Coolidge, founder of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, to explore St. Louis urban landscape Oct. 26-29

Oct. 12, 2005 -- Forget purple mountains and fruited plains. The contemporary American landscape is more typically composed of parking lots and shopping malls, factory towns and industrial developments, argues Matthew Coolidge, founder and director of the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) in Los Angeles. Later this month, Coolidge will host a series of events investigating St. Louis' urban landscape.

The visit -- co-sponsored by the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts and the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University -- comes as part of "Unsettled Ground: Nature, Landscape, and Ecology Now!" a yearlong series of lectures, panel discussions, artistic interventions and workshops exploring the intersection of contemporary architecture, art, ecology and urban design.

At 7 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 26, Coolidge will lecture on "Interpreting Anthropogeomorphology: Programs and Projects of the Center for Land Use Interpretation." ("Anthropogeomorphology," a phrase Coolidge coined, refers to the landscape as altered by humans.)

The talk is free and open to the public and takes place in the Sam Fox School's Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, located near the intersection of Forsyth and Skinker boulevards.

On Thursday and Friday, Oct. 27 and 28, Coolidge and Washington University students will examine a variety of "unusual and exemplary" St. Louis sites through a series of workshops collectively titled "Looking for St. Louis."

On Saturday, Oct. 29, workshop participants will in turn lead additional volunteers over "routes" established by Coolidge.

Events conclude from 6 to 8 p.m. Saturday with a special, one-night-only exhibition, also titled "Looking for St. Louis," at the Sam Fox School's Des Lee Gallery, 1627 Washington Ave. The exhibition will include images, texts, artifacts and diagrams drawn from the workshops.

For more information, call (314) 935-9347 or email samfoxschool@wustl.edu.