About the art
The south garden and courtyard adjacent to Knowlton Hall, both designed by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA), is a public artwork meant to be seen, touched and inhabited. Providing a respite from the busy campus, the courtyard offers a cool and shady area that encourages visitors to reflect on the connections between architecture and nature. Massive slabs of gray- and black-veined white marble serve as benches. The large rectangular blocks feature both clean-cut corners and the occasional raw edge, as though they were only recently quarried. Greenery surrounds the area, blocking outside noise for small class discussions or casual meetings. The overall effect is of having stumbled upon a hidden gathering place within a small grove of trees.
Among its many architectural features, Knowlton Hall is notable for its contemporary style and its facade, a rainscreen made of white marble shingles, creating a compelling contrast to the weighty monumental marble elements of MVVA’s southern courtyard. While we might associate marble with the marks of human intervention — for example, with its use in figural sculpture or architecture — it is fundamentally a geologic material, cut from the earth.
Collection of The Ohio State University. Funded through the Ohio Percent for Art program.
Material
Mixed media
Location
Outside of the Knowlton School (south courtyard)
About the artist
Michael Van Valkenburgh founded Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA) in 1982 after receiving his Master of Landscape Architecture from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1977. Van Valkenburgh claims his greatest influences were his upbringing on a dairy farm in upstate New York and his initial education at the College of Agriculture at Cornell University. One of Van Valkenburgh’s goals is to bring recognition to landscape architecture as independent from traditional architecture. While often seen as ancillary to the design of buildings, landscape architecture — the design of outdoor spaces such as public parks, landmarks, or, in this case, courtyards — is a field with its own history dating back to the early nineteenth century. In his work as a landscape architect, Van Valkenburgh values not only the look of finished projects but the experience of time and material they offer once inhabited. Works such as Knowlton’s courtyard and rooftop garden argue that created environments and natural ones are both improved by their overlapping and co-existence.
