Tree Walk

Tree Walk

Sunday May 21 2017
2:30pm
Washington University entrance, Lindell at Skinker

In partnership with the department of walking | http://www.dptwlk.org

This walk promotes the bodily experience of the Brookings Drive Pin Oak allée one last time. Participants will complete an orchestrated mediation between the vastness of tree body and individual body by materially mapping the interconnected condition between these beings. Each participant will partner with one tree, and begin their solo walk from that tree into the vastness of the allée — each establishing their individual trajectory, interacting with other participants and trees along the way. Pace, direction and interaction with fellow participants matter.

And so, while you begin at one tree – you go on a journey ultimately mapping out the constellation of trees and their interconnectivity that makes this landscape an allée. The material result is a mapping of individual paths, but also a mapping of interaction, and ultimately connectivity.

ABOUT

This interdisciplinary design studio proposes to use the redevelopment of the historic pin-oak allee at Washington University in St. Louis as catalyst for a project-based investigation of our landscape and resource legacy. With the imminent transformation this cultural landscape, this course will be structured around an historical and ecological analysis and evaluation of an 85 year old oak allee in an effort to offer a window into the greater meaning of trees in our urban ecosystem and cultures. Working with arborists, ecologists, landscape architects, sculptors, dendrochronologists, craftspeople, and poets, students will interrogate the many meanings of one tree — from root to crown, from microbial sub-soil cultures to species habitats in its highest branches, from the monoculture of the 50 trees in the allee to the diverse community in Forest Park and beyond. The class will be organized around the ritual lifting of a single tree in advance of the campus transformation, with subsequent cutting, dimensioning, and drying of the wood forming the material basis for design research.

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