Unscene Landscapes: Exploring Relationships with Place through Time, an exhibit by the College of Environment and Design’s Cultural Landscape Lab, will be on display in the college’s Circle Gallery Feb. 21 through March 22. Open free to the public, the show’s opening reception will be held Feb. 28 from 4:30-6 p.m.
The exhibit shares some of the Southeast’s most treasured landscapes and their histories. Items on display will highlight aspects of the Cultural Landscape Laboratory’s project sites including the 2,000-acre Stratford Hall Plantation on the Potomac River in Virginia, home of the colonial Lee family; Wormsloe Plantation, whose family descendants have a direct connection to the founding of the city of Savannah; the Colonial Revival Founders Memorial Garden on the UGA campus; Hyde Farm, an intact 1920s Piedmont farm located in Cobb County; and Fort Sumter National Monument and Cowpens National Battlefield in South Carolina.
Each of these sites is undergoing extensive study by graduate students and faculty in the CED with the goal of creating in-depth site histories, historic resource inventories, maps and other forms of documentation that will assist in managing these historic sites as significant cultural places of the American landscape. Photographs, drawings, maps and artifacts are included in the exhibit revealing hidden dimensions of the human-built environment, such as the ecological interactions of plants and animals, the processes of geological change and weather, and the complex layering of human stories about past people and events.
Since the early 1980s, the environment and design college has played an instrumental role in the evolving discipline of cultural landscape management. CED professors pioneered concepts for the field and educated many graduates who became leaders and advocates for cultural landscapes in both governmental and private sectors. Building upon this legacy, the CED established the Cultural Landscape Laboratory in 2010 to provide research and learning opportunities for students, faculty and professional practitioners in the area of cultural landscape management.
