Chris Taylor
Director of Land Arts of the American West; Associate Professor
M. Arch, Harvard University
Bachelor of Design (Architecture), University of Florida
Chris Taylor is the director of Land Arts of the American West at Texas Tech University and an Associate Professor of Architecture. He studied architecture at the University of Florida and the Graduate School of Design at Harvard and has been with the College of Architecture since 2008.
His research interests investigate land art, landscape, embodied fieldwork, and making-based design. In 2001, he began developing Land Arts as a semester abroad program in our own backyard to investigate the intersection of human construction and the evolving shape of the planet. His books, Land Arts of the American West and Incubo Atacama Lab, chronicle the evolution of this field research—operating across the arid lands of the Americas. He has lectured extensively at institutions including Yale University, Parsons The New School, Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, University of Arizona, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Universidad Catolica in Santiago de Chile. He has worked with artist Tacita Dean on the creation of film works "JG" (2012) and "Antigone" (2017) and led workshops for the Alps Art Academy in Tenna, Switzerland, the MFA in Applied Craft and Design at Oregon College of Art and Craft + Pacific Northwest College of Art, and Incubo in the Atacama Desert and Santiago de Chile. Taylor and the Land Arts program are a prominent feature in the documentary film "Through the Repellent Fence" (2017) and have been featured in the New York Times.
In 2015 with artist Steve Badgett, Taylor designed and constructed the Great Salt Lake Exploration Platform, funded in part by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, to facilitate visual and performative research within the vastly under-explored landscape of the Great Salt Lake in Utah. In 2019, the project was renamed the Terminal Lake Exploration Platform for inclusion in the international biennale Desert X to image the bottom of the Salton Sea. Working in collaboration with the Center for Land Use Interpretation, the Platform will continue to investigate terminal conditions in the American West.
You can follow his works and travels of the Land Arts program on Instagram (@land_arts) or visit his website, Land Arts of the American West.
Contact
chris.taylor@ttu.edu
806.834.1589
Room 709
Office Hours: By appointment
Huckabee College of Architecture
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Address
Texas Tech University, 1800 Flint Avenue, Lubbock, TX 79409 -
Phone
806.742.3136 -
Email
architecture@ttu.edu