Overlook: Exploring the Internal Fringes of America with the Center for Land Use Interpretation

Sarah Simons, Ralph Rugoff

ISBN 10: 1933045337 / ISBN 13: 9781933045337

Editore: Metropolis Books, 2006

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Dati bibliografici

• Titolo: Overlook: Exploring the Internal Fringes of America with the Center for Land Use Interpretation
• Editore: Metropolis Books
• Data di pubblicazione: 2006
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 1933045337
• ISBN 13: 9781933045337
• Rilegatura: paperback
• Condizione: Very Good

Descrizione articolo

Riassunto

A town at the bottom of a reservoir. A covert military installation. A downsized Olestra plant. Sites like these rarely appear on street maps. But they are windows into the American psyche, landmarks that manifest the rich ambiguities of the nation's cultural history.
The Center for Land Use Interpretation draws us into such places, serving as a kind of curator of the American landscape, and a tour guide, helping people understand this vast and complex country.
Here, drawing on more than a decade of work, the Center for Land Use Interpretation reflects on how the nation's lands have been parceled out, put to use, and understood. Seeking out "the unusual and the exemplary," it takes us through ghost towns and show caves, past soap and shoelace factories, to open pit mines, casinos, landfills and art installations. We see the dry lakes where atomic bombs were tested and the ersatz villages where rescue workers train for toxic spills and other disasters.
The Statue of Liberty and Mount Rushmore may loom large in the American imagination and draw the crowds. But the unsung places like those chronicled in Overlook have at least as much to say about American society, if not more. This, after all, is the America where we live.

Product Description

The Center for Land Use Interpretation is a research-based educational organization that produces public programs about the built landscape of the United States from its sites in Los Angeles, Utah and the Mojave desert, with an upstate New York location opening in 2006. The Center's aim is to increase and diffuse information about how the nation's lands are apportioned, utilized and perceived. Recent examples of their work include a two-day "Tour of the Monuments of the Great American Void" by bus and the exhibit "Immersed Remains: Towns Submerged in America." This book takes readers on a tour through the strangely unfamiliar land that Americans live in, demonstrating that we can understand ourselves and the nation by examining the clues on display all around us, often clearly visible but ignored. Each chapter explores a different topic, from an in-depth look at Ohio ("the most all-American state"); through scale shifts in model landscapes, exemplified in the three largest hydraulic models in the world; and law-enforcement training environments that "simulate" public space. Readers can dive into the hidden and enchanting world of show caves, where America is on display underground; and come up into the Great Basin, a zone covering most of Nevada, and portions of Utah, California, Oregon, Idaho and Mexico, whose network of watersheds has no outlet to the ocean. Following lines and edges, through cities, suburbs, small towns and wide-open spaces, the Center guides us upstream, toward the heart of another America--the same, but different.