Air Shed is a maker-based design project and approach to an art-science landscape installation, highlighting the ecology, research, and culture of air and atmosphere at the HJ Andrews Experimental Forest in Blue River, Oregon. Through an iterative, prototype-driven design process, a hybrid practice combining art, ecology, and technology was developed and applied through a rigorous design-build application.
Air Shed is a physical structure, which acts as a metaphorical framework to tell the 20-part narrative of air and atmosphere. Each part is represented through a modular, 44” x 44” constructed panel. The structure incorporates instrumentation and environmental monitoring data to illuminate this invisible yet driving force of how we experience the landscape.
Air Shed investigates how art and installation design can foster environmental awareness, as our atmosphere undergoes rapid changes. Landscape architects are in a unique position to design with this powerful process in mind. Air Shed highlights our connection to landscape, as it explores this intensive inquiry into environmental systems.
We live in an ocean of air. It exists around and within us, yet we rarely perceive it with our senses. What is air, and why is it so important? Air structures our daily lives as it forms our atmosphere, making aspirations possible and our planet habitable. It is the medium of living creatures, pollutants, and electronic messages. Air is cyclical. It has no boundaries and is constantly balancing itself on the global scale, creating our climate, weather, and bioregions. How can we foster care for this massive, yet imperceptible force?
Landscape architects are in a unique position to study and care for air. Many of us specialize in visualization but struggle to represent air. It is an invisible component of every landscape, controlling how we experience spaces. Through a better understanding of airsheds, we can begin to share the ordinarily invisible through our designs. Air Shed, an MLA thesis project conducted at the University of Oregon, promotes this active awareness and communicates themes around this essential system.
This was a maker-based project that explored narrative and form through iterative, rapid-prototyping design. The project followed a cyclical methodology, where all methods were ongoing throughout the process. This included research into a wide variety of publications on air and atmosphere. I explored critical art and technology studies through the Routledge Handbook, built landscapes in Atmospheric Anatomies, classical landscape ecology from Richard Forman, history and background of the HJA Experimental Forest, poetic narrative from David Berman’s Actual Air, and graphic communication research from Eric Sloane.
From the early stages of the project, I engaged regional scientists, designers and artists and developed a network to receive critical feedback. I shared designs and narratives with the community at several public events, including the Landscape Makers Exhibition at the LaVerne Krause Gallery in January 2022 in Eugene, Oregon, and the College of Forestry Exhibition at Oregon State’s Red Emerson Advanced Wood Products Lab in April 2022 in Corvallis, Oregon. These exhibitions were invaluable, allowing me to test the structural capabilities through full scale-prototypes and receive real-time feedback from the community.
I’ve spent a significant amount of time at the HJ Andrews Experimental Forest in Blue River, Oregon, which has been a site of inspiration and inquiry. Located in the Cascade Range, this 15,800-acre forest contains iconic old-growth conifers, draped in moss and lichen, and cold, fast-running streams. The HJA is a hub for collaborative forest ecosystem research between scientists, students, land managers, and artists. They operate a series of meteorological stations that record weather information including wind speed, wind direction, and air quality. As a part of the Long-Term Ecological Research Network, the HJA is able to ask important large-scale questions about climate and forest management.
Through this process, I developed and refined a 20-part landscape narrative. This is split into five chapters, each with four parts that contain a poetic and scientific narrative. In chapter one, the narrative begins with Defining Air. This includes foundational information including the chemistry of air, layers of the atmosphere, air terminology, and defining an airshed. In chapter two, the narrative continues with Carried By Air, which explores all living and nonliving things that exist in our collective airspace - pollutants, bio-aerosols, smoke, and electronic signals. Chapter three discusses air’s relationship with weather and climate, including air indexes, cloud
typologies, lightning, and global wind patterns. Chapter four highlights more experiential and direct relationships between humans and air, including air as recreation, wind power, mental health and air through meteoroanxiety, and sound. Finally, Chapter 5 shifts focus towards fostering Care for Air through the appreciation of the beauty of air movement, meditation and breathing, sensing the invisible, and calls toward action.
Each part of the narrative is also represented through a modular, 44” x 44” panel art piece. The material palette was intentionally limited to wood, a few colors of paint, canvas fabric, and instrumentation to remain cohesive. They were often cut with CNC.
Breathe in, breathe out. The airshed is breathing too. Up the valley in the morning, back down in the evening. We are all a part of this complex ecosystem, trading our carbon for oxygen, engaging in the intimate process of decay with our landscapes. This project challenges us to meditate on our connection to the landscape. Through the Air Shed, these processes are interpreted and celebrated, as they are increasingly critical to understand changes in our atmosphere, weather, and air quality.
This project was advised by David Buckley Borden and received additional guidance from:
• Tom Gottelier, Designers on Holiday
• Fred Swanson and Julia Jones, HJ Andrews Experimental Forest
• Colin Ives, College of Design
• Tom Coates, College of Design
• Mark VanScoy, Harvard forest
• Jon Bonner, Independent Artist
• Kennedy Rauh, Nancy Silvers, and Ian Vierk, Fuller Initiative Design Fellows