The Unfinished L andscape
A photographic study of kansas city’s west bottoms Leandra Burnett Kansas City Design Center
Equipment: Olympus E-410 14.0z-42.0mm lens A part of the Kansas City Design Center West Bottoms Urban Vision Plan: Fall 2010 - Spring 2011
CONTENTS 2 5 9 15 21
the unfinished landscape land of the train land of the car the ambiguous sky the ambiguous ground
THE UNFINISHED LANDSCAPE The West Bottoms is a part of the city that has encountered a lifetime left exposed to the natural, urban, and industrial wear. It has not the finished polish of downtowns and city centers, and it is exactly this unfinished quality that is the cohesion and sensibility behind the landscape of the West Bottoms. It’s a combination of deterioration and unmonitored growth, disintegration and accumulation, mismatched identities and playful juxtapositions. These actions are played out by both permanent elements of the landscape and the infrastructural elements that are actively working in the city, exposing the urban ecosystem, allowing the “unfinished� elements to form an aesthetic of gritty balance that flows and changes as the city does. It is my intention to communicate the elegance and reach of this balance in my photography. The sample that I have taken is the train, the car, the sky and the ground. The train and the car are urban players, whose active presence is felt more powerfully here than anywhere else in the city. Their infrastructure composes so much of the built environment that they arguably inhabit the city as much as individual people. The sky and ground are the most essential elements of a landscape, but even these are not statically defined in the West Bottoms. Their individual identities are augmented by ephemeral limits (flyover zones and floodplains) and infrastructural elements (roadways and levees).
land of the train
land of the car
the ambiguous sky
the ambiguous ground