Making the Freeway Safe for the Free Way
a lecture by Eric Fredericksen

Thursday, August 14, 2008, 19:00



The talk will use the ha-ha, the concealed trench used in 18th century English garden design to separate garden from working countryside without a visible barrier, as a way to think about situations where landscape designs mediate antagonistic forces: Olmsted and Vaux's transverse roads at Central Park, Isamu Noguchi and Louis Kahn's projects for playgrounds, the US Interstate Highway System, JG Ballard's "Concrete Island," contemporary architecture and ramps (Koolhaas, Hadid, Tschumi), Weiss Manfredi's Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle, and post-9/11 building security design.

Eric Fredericksen is the director of Western Bridge, the exhibition space of the Ruth and William True Collection, in Seattle. Recent publications include the catalogs for Crash. Pause. Rewind. and Hadley+Maxwell: 1 + 1 - 1. He previously was an editor and writer at Architecture and The Stranger, and has contributed to Nest and Metropolis. He has a B.A. in Theater from Williams College and was a fellow of the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University.


* with special thanks to Hadley+Maxwell