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Exhibition Preview: First the Forests on view through March 15 in the Druker Design Gallery

Listen to Günther Vogt describing three of the six projects featured in the exhibition First the Forests.

Architecture has always played an important role as a mediator between humans and the environment. This separation, achieved through the basis of architectural form–walls, doors, roofs and windows–enabled humans to contemplate the outside from the comforts of architectural space. This relationship has marked the way in which we view and experience nature. Perception became mediated through architecture as doors and windows turned into pin-hole devices through which we could project ideas of nature.

The exhibition explores the plant imaginary by bringing landscape into the confines of the architectonic space, turning inside-out the landscape-architecture relation. The cabin in the woods–a reference to Thoreau’s temporary home in the adjacent woods and what many consider to be the birthplace of the environmental movement – becomes a surrogate architecture through which the relationship between humans and their environment is explored.  The result is a series of experiments in observation and analysis that create a wide variety of environmental experiences.

What we see on the walls of the exhibition space are windows into the workings of VOGT Landscape Architects, vignettes into the methodologies, exercises, and projects through which we explore and analyze vegetation as a central element of our practice.  The gallery becomes a shelter for the landscape that we seek to understand – a space to explore the relationship between humans and nature through experiment and experience.

Learn more about Günther Vogt’s project Traveling Landscapes in the Zürich Zoo:

Learn more about Günther Vogt’s project Collective Memory in Hamburg, Germany:

Learn more about Günther Vogt’s project Drifting Giants for Drägerwerk in Lübeck, Germany: