2015 - ATLANTA, GEORGIA
MEDITATION ROOM: REFLECTING ON HORIZON
ATLANTA, GEORGIA
The horizon line is one crucial reference when experiencing landscape. What distinguishes a city from all other places are the multiple horizon lines stacked over one another, receding or advancing towards you, creating an effect of constriction and enclosure. The search for the sense of an open horizon is partly satisfied in an urban park: perhaps the real pleasure an urban park provides is not through its vegetation, as assumed, but its release from the constricted horizon line.
In Meditation Room: Reflecting on Horizon, commissioned by the City of Atlanta for ELEVATE 2015, the reflection of the sky and the earth introduces a new clear fabricated horizon in an otherwise congested urban panorama. Members of the public are invited to come in for a five minute meditation, a pause, to connect with the sense of an expansive horizon in the smallest of spaces.
Diana Balmori wrote in Drawing and Reinventing Landscape (Wiley, 2014) that “Landscape architecture is an art of peripheral vision. Peripheral vision is essential for understanding and appreciating landscape; central vision alone cannot capture it.”
Reflecting on Horizon is part of an ongoing series of experimental art installations from Balmori that explore themes such as peripheral vision by creating meditative experiences in the urban realm.
Balmori Associates completed its first meditation room, Meditation Room: Horizon presented by The Drawing Center for the New Museum’s Ideas City Festival 2015. In September, “Making Horizon” opened at the 10th China (Wuhan) International Garden Expo. Read more