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Environmental artist and designer Michael Singer will present “Michael Singer: Intersections between Art, Architecture and Planning” 8 p.m. March 27 in the Williams Center for the Arts, room 108. He will also present a workshop for interested architecture, art, and environmentally-concerned students at 4 p.m.
Singer’s presentation will be the 2007 John and Muriel Landis Lecture. Established by Trustee Emeritus John Landis ’39, the Landis Lecture Series focuses on issues of technology and international cooperation. Previous Landis lecturers include author Isaac Asimov; New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas L. Friedman, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and recipient of the National Book Award; television journalist and former Texas state district judge Catherine Crier; B. Gentry Lee, space-systems engineer and science fiction novelist; Alden Meyer, director of government relations for the Union of Concerned Scientists; and Peter H. Gleick, co-founder and president of Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security.
“Michael Singer is a key figure in ecologically sustainable architecture and landscape design,” says Robert Mattison, Metzgar Professor of Art. “His projects include waste facilities transformed into gardens. Rather than viewing such facilities as necessary but undesirable, Singer has recreated them as aesthetically pleasing locations. His combination of art and ecological necessity marks him as a visionary in the field of ecological renewal.
“Any student with an interest in our environment and/or the arts and culture should be interested in his lecture. His ideas are particularly germane to Lafayette’s engineering emphasis, its new architecture minor, and its growing ecological awareness.”
Singer’s recent work has been instrumental in transforming public art, architecture, landscape and planning projects into successful models for urban and ecological renewal, which have contributed to the definition of site specific art and the development of public places. In 1993, The New York Times chose Singer’s design of a massive waste recycling and transfer station in Phoenix as one of the top eight design events of the year. He has been involved in a variety of landscape and outdoor environment, planning, and infrastructure projects in the United States and Europe.
Singer has received numerous awards, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.
Current civic projects include a mile-long waterfront in West Palm Beach, planning strategies for historic Boca Raton, and a collaboration with Environmental Defense on a white paper titled “Re-Thinking Infrastructure: Can We Live With What Sustains Us.”
Whole Foods Market has also commissioned Michael Singer Studio to create green site planning guidelines and concept shell designs for all of its new sites in South Florida. Singer was the Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the College of Arts and Letters for several years at Florida Atlantic University, and continues his work at the university today leading local community and on-campus initiatives.