ron Street Park at Channel Center | Concrete tablet by Halvorson Design with interpretive inscription by Flanders + Associates . Mosaic inlay : City Square with Reflecting Pool by Lisa Houck
Esplanade Playspace | Bronze sculpture : It ’ s Turtles All the Way Down by David Phillips photo by Ed Wonsel
Ephemeral and Temporal Art
Halvorson Design ’ s richly textured composition of open lawn , ornamental shrubs and canopy trees at the Massachusetts Horticultural Society parcels of the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway in Boston establishes an ideal ground for temporary installations of art . Janet Echelman ’ s 2015 aerial sculpture , entitled As If It Were Already Here , drifts elegantly above the landscape . The translucent shades of red , orange , green and violet metamorphose when viewed from varied angles and times of day and night , when the play of light and shadow allows the sculpture to fade into the sky one moment , and emerge vibrant and striking in the next , in sharp contrast to the greenery below . Additionally , the formal lawn facing Dewey Square serves as a foreground for large-scale murals ; the most recent feature is a 2014 mixed media installation by Shinique Smith concurrent with her exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts , Boston .
A particularly sensitive collaboration took shape in 2011 at the grounds of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management . Conceived by artist Cai Guo-Qiang , twelve interlocking granite rings mark the twelve months of the Chinese lunar calendar , while the seven Japanese black pine trees planted within them convey the passage of time as they grow and take shape in relationship to the rings grounded beneath them .
Working with the artist , the landscape by Halvorson Design carefully considered the siting of the installation , relying on Cai ’ s knowledge of the principles of feng shui to determine the placement in reference to the site and the adjacent street . The location of the rings forms a protective boundary between the Sloan School and the bustling traffic of Main Street and Broadway . The relationship between the carved stone and black pines juxtaposes elements of permanence and ephemerality to articulate the changing nature of the landscape .
This evolving approach to collaboration represents a blurring of boundaries — through which art functions integrally with the landscape , and the landscape becomes an element of artistic expression — and reflects a shift in the contemporary discourse of art . No longer constrained by the formal conventions of exhibition and display , the work of artists in the public sphere has become increasingly interactive and sensitive to spatial environments . The work of Halvorson Design , including extensive collaborations with numerous artists , has long embraced the potential of art to further the agenda of landscape architecture as a means of creating memorable places of beauty that engage communities and shape the urban environment .
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