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The first PLOT Vol 5 Lunchtime Lecture Series on Thursday Oct 27^th 2016 featured PLOT cover artist Patricia Johanson (‘77). Since the 1960s, the artist Johanson has focused her interdisciplinary work on combining art, ecology, landscape, and infrastructure into multifunctional public landscapes. A graduate of Bennington College (BA, 1962) and Hunter College (MA, 1964), Johanson also received a Bachelor of Architecture degree from the City College of New York in 1977.

In 1969, House & Garden magazine asked her, innocently enough, what the future of the American garden might look like. Her response was an outpouring of 150 annotated colored pencil drawings, presenting a radical view that merged art and ecology with urban landscapes, buildings, and infrastructure. Johanson’s titles are as prescient and evocative as the drawings themselves: “Building that Cleans its Own Water,” “Food Park: Oysters,” “Garbage Garden,” “Garden Cities: Turtle Mound,” and the image shown below, “Regional Highway Garden: Nature Walk.” Johanson continues to investigate urban architectural and environmental systems, and her current work includes projects for filtering landscapes in Dallas, Texas; Petaluma, California; Salt Lake City, Utah; and Scranton, Pennsylvania.