OF
THE
LAND

This is young America. An America that had a unsurmountable task ahead of it: the design of a third of a continent, 3.8 million square miles of it. Of the Land is a coming of age story of a country that had just inherited more land then it knew what to do with. It is a portrait that from 1776 to 1926, from the consecreation of the country to the formalization of it's land in the 1926 legalization of function based zoning in Euclid, Ohio.

During this period of 140 years the American Frontier opened and closed. It is a 140 year charrette that saw a shift in the collective American land attiude from the enthusiasm of westward expansion to the nascent rise of American conservation. The result was a double sided country. The East, the first side and the West, the second, third, fourth, and fifth consequtive sides. The East is an expanse of private ownership void of any major public investment. The West, public land heavy where: parks, preserves, forests, vastly outnumbers the private. The resulting country is a timeline, read East to West, that follows the evolution of American land-use developement. At face value the conclusion is the West is more beautiful then the east, more worth saving then the east. The east, consumable.

Yet, this isn't about the division of land into what is public and what is private. It is the a coming of age story of the average American's values. Tracing the continential timeline exposes the effects of the beauty of the natural land and the proclivities of the people who occupy it. The landscape varies from East to West in geologic will and in the cultural aptitude which shape the contemporary view of it. This is the story of both. The east and the west. The land and the people. OF THE LAND resets the frontier reverting to a serise of pre-frontiers when a young country was tasked again and again with the design of a country. Each country a slightly disfigured image of the last. Each American a slightly disfigured image of the last.