The MFA in Applied Craft and Design welcomes Chris Taylor for the 2011-2012 Graduate Visiting Artist Lecture Series.

Chris Taylor is an architect, educator, and director of Land Arts of the American West at Texas Tech University. His lecture, “Testing Perceptual Thresholds with Land Arts of the American West” will present the embodied knowledge created by the immersive field program that brings students across the American southwest each fall. Students camp for two months and travel six thousand miles overland, while making no-trace work and exploring the natural and human forces that shape contemporary landscapes—forces that range from geology and weather, to cigarette butts and hydroelectric dams.

Taylor currently teaches within the College of Architecture at Texas Tech, but has also taught in interdisciplinary design and architecture programs at a variety of other institutions. He is the recipient of the Steedman Traveling Fellowship in Architecture where he spent a year mapping the space between buildings, water and sky in Venice, Italy. He explores the interstitial forces creating landscape through his practice, the Architecture Workers Combine, and has translated renga, an ancient form of Japanese poetry, into an operative model for building. He studied architecture at the University of Florida and received his Masters of Architecture from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard.
Co-sponsored by Museum of Contemporary Craft.