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Jeffrey Nesbit & Charles Waldheim
‘Technical Lands'
Today’s conversation is with Jeffrey Nesbit and Charles Waldheim about their book Technical Lands.
Technical Lands: A Critical Primer edited by Jeffrey S Nesbit and Charles Waldheim, Photo by Jennifer Holt
It was great to have both Jeffrey and Charles back on the program. They’ve both been on here separately but today we’re discussing their new edited book ‘Technical Lands: A Critical Primer’. As they state in the book, designating land as technical is a political act and doing so entails dividing, marginalizing, and rendering portions of the Earth inaccessible. This is land that is often invisible and remote. The range of contributing authors includes architectural historians, landscape architects, anthropologists, sociologists as well as cultural and political geographers. This ‘deep bench’ of disciplinary practices is needed to better understand and draw out how technical lands are defined and maybe even more importantly, demonstrate why it’s necessary to bring them to the foreground of our conversations.
Hope you enjoy the episode and until next time… take care.
Technical Lands: A Critical Primer
Other episodes linked to the topic include Ep 072 Jane Hutton, ‘Reciprocal Landscapes’ , Ep 097 Michael Jakob, ‘Faux Mountains’, Ep 056 Bradley Cantrell, ‘AI and Wildness’ and many others. Try the websites ‘search’ function to find more related episodes.
Jeffrey Nesbit
Jeffrey S. Nesbit is an architect, urbanist, and founding director of the research group Grounding Design. Nesbit’s research focuses on processes of urbanization, infrastructure, and the evolution of “technical lands.” Currently, his research examines the 20th-century American spaceport complex at the intersection of architecture, infrastructure, and aerospace history. Nesbit has published several journal articles, book chapters, and is editor of Nature of Enclosure (Actar, 2022), co-editor of Technical Lands: A Critical Primer (Jovis, 2023), New Geographies 11 Extraterrestrial (Actar, 2019), Nesbit is Assistant Professor in History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism at Temple University.
Charles Waldheim
Waldheim is a North American architect and urbanist. Waldheim’s research examines the relations between landscape, ecology, and contemporary urbanism. He is author, editor, or co-editor of numerous books on these subjects, and his writing has been published and translated internationally. Waldheim is John E. Irving Professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design where he directs the School’s Office for Urbanization. Waldheim is recipient of the Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome; the Visiting Scholar Research Fellowship at the Study Centre of the Canadian Centre for Architecture; the Cullinan Chair at Rice University; and the Sanders Fellowship at the University of Michigan
