Archive Post-Landscape: Between Nature and Culture

Curator's Essay | Images from the Exhibition | Kim Abeles Sandow Birk | Laurie Brown | Elizabeth Bryant The Center for Land Use Interpretation | Wanda Hammerbeck Andreas Hessing | Sant Khalsa | Skeet McAuley Kathryn Miller | Diana Thater | Post-Landscape Home Page Archive - Fall 2001 Home

The Center for Land Use Interpretation

The Center for Land Use Interpretation is a nonprofit research organization interested in understanding the nature and extent of human interaction with the Earth's surface. The Center embraces a multidisciplinary approach to fulfilling the stated mission, employing conventional research and information-processing methodology as well as nontraditional interpretive tools.

The Center's Land Use Database is a resource of information on unusual and exemplary land-use sites across North America. From this collection of files, maps, photographs, and continuous research come Center projects such as guidebooks and other publications, exhibitions, public tours, and thematic activities and events related to understanding and interpreting the landscapes that surround us.

The Land Use Museum Complex is a network of exhibit sites across the United States. Facilities currently include an exhibit hall, studio, and residence program at Wendover, Utah, as well as displays in remote locations.

The Center maintains a searchable database on the World Wide Web, containing information on more than one thousand interesting physical locations, sorted by the Center's land-use classification system (mining sites, military sites, industrial sites, radioactive sites, transportation sites, water sites, waste sites, cultural sites, and research and development sites). The Center's library, photographic archive, and files are available to individual researchers by appointment.

The Center also publishes a quarterly newsletter, The Lay of the Land, which is distributed to interested individuals, academics, educators, artists, and journalists. Exhibits and lectures are held continuously throughout the year at the Center's exhibit hall in Los Angeles, and at other museums and galleries.

The Center is neither an environmental group nor an industry-affiliated organization. Rather, the work of the Center integrates the many approaches to land use, the many perspectives of the landscape, into a single vision that illustrates the common ground in “land-use” debates. At the very least, the Center attempts to emphasize the multiplicity of points of view regarding the utilization of terrestrial and geographic resources.