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 VOL. 46 NO. 17, NOVEMBER 6, 2002 A
GLOBAL LANDSCAPE BY ANDREW VOWLES If there are aliens looking down at us from space, Michael Salisbury wants to make sure we're making the right impression. For an aspiring landscape architect and self-described "earthartist," that means carrying out the ultimate design on the largest sculptural medium available to him: the Earth itself. Over a morning coffee in the Brass Taps, the 36-year-old landscape architecture student explains his fledgling idea. Only two objects made by humans are visible from space, neither conveying quite the right message to any extraterrestrial visitor, at least to Salisbury's mind. |
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The other object, and one that you wouldn't necessarily want to visit, is a landfill outside New York City. Says Salisbury, a longtime cycling fanatic and environmentalist: What better - or worse - symbol of excess than that? |
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As stated on his earthartist.com Web site, one of his long-term aspirations is to "conceive and develop a large-scale landscape design that will be visible from space." Hang on. How does he reconcile what sounds like hubris on a monumental scale with his professed interest in ecologically sound landscape design practices such as "green graveyards"? He hasn't yet thought through the details, but he says his plan might involve a large-scale environmental reclamation project, such as reversing the spread of a desert: grandiose but green. For now, that kind of project will have to wait while he completes his undergraduate degree as a mature student. On a smaller scale, Salisbury has already had a chance to develop his ideas about landscape design, including landscape iconography and spiritual landscapes. Last year, he explored his interest in landscape sculpture through a project at Coronation Public School in Cambridge. As part of an outreach program, he and several student colleagues designed and installed a courtyard garden for the school. Then they went further. They ended up designing "Salamander Earthworks," a 250-square-metre creative play space for the kindergarten to Grade 5 students. What he describes as an oversized sandbox shaped like a salamander was intended partly to relieve the monotony of several acres of featureless playground. Salisbury also integrated art and ecology with Succession Park, his design for a park on the site of a former quarry that won first prize in the student design competition held in 2001 by the Aggregate Producers' Association of Ontario. During his internship in Shanghai this year, he worked for a California-based firm on a variety of projects. That work involved not so much design but interpretation and presentation of ideas for everything from residential complexes and a hotel to a large urban park. "The Chinese market puts great value on western ideas," he says. "To have a westerner present a project gave them a lot of confidence." Back in Guelph for his final year, Salisbury is now continuing work on several projects, including fleshing out a feasibility study for a so-called "green graveyard." Also called a woodland cemetery or an eco-cemetery, this kind of burial ground emphasizes environmentally sensitive practices, from using a biodegradable coffin to eschewing the traditional granite grave marker for a tree planted over or near the grave. He says woodland cemeteries are becoming more popular in the United Kingdom as well as in California. Explaining the ecological benefits of groves of trees over rows of gravestones, Salisbury says: "I'm not going to memorialize my life with a big stone in the middle of grass; I'm going to create a forest." Alternative graveyard design and landscape architecture come together for Salisbury in his interest in sacred places. Among the numerous links on his Web site (his home page features a clickable image of Stonehenge on - what else? - Salisbury Plain) is a description of his recent visit to Serpent Mounds Park, a native burial ground near Peterborough. One day while his wife, Ruthann, and their daughters, Samantha and Jacqui, went swimming, he climbed to the burial mounds above Rice Lake. "It felt as though my thoughts and feelings were transcending time and space as my mind shifted away from the past and towards my own recent loss (my mother having passed on only weeks earlier). A strange feeling came over me as though I had been invited to a family reunion, with the spirits of the past gathered together on the grassy knoll. It was peaceful. I felt continuity and belonging, as if I were sharing my loss with all those who had mourned here before me." Salisbury says he's learned to trust those "strange feelings." It was a similar sensation that led him to enroll in the landscape architecture program four years ago. As a part-time student taking a business course at Guelph, he had found himself in the Landscape Architecture Building one day. Stumbling across the second-floor design studios, he experienced a visceral connection, the same feeling he remembered from his days as a diploma student at the Toronto School of Art in the late 1980s. "I felt this energy and excitement," he says. By then, he had been looking for a new direction, following the failure of a cycling shop and a bicycle assembly franchise chain he had established in Guelph a few years earlier. Growing up in his native Brampton, he used to rescue bicycle skeletons from the garbage, repair them and sell them. Today, he still relies on a self-modified mountain bike for the 20-minute ride to campus. Besides visiting the Great Wall, Salisbury says the best part of his China trip was sharing the roads with thousands of fellow cyclists, not to mention motorists. "Functional anarchy" is how he describes the experience, which paradoxically he found less stressful than riding or driving here in Canada. "There were no traffic rules, but only traffic suggestions," he says.
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