Ben Barsotti Scott, PLA
I’m a landscape architect licensed in the state of New York. I also curate exhibitions, primarily through a collaborative project called Bad Little Brother. And I’m a student of historical geography, currently researching a series of civilian-led blockades of US Navy terminals in the final years of the Vietnam War.
Occasionally, I’m also a teacher and critic at schools of art and architecture: see the syllabus for my 2022 undergraduate course on contemporary architectural theory here. Even more occasionally, I write for architecture and urban geography titles like the the New York Review of Architecture, Critical Planning Journal, and the Journal of Landscape Architecture. You can see my full CV here.
I live and work in New York City and commute every once in a while to New Jersey.
I post some of my recent and ongoing work on this site. If you’re interested in working together, you can contact me here.
Ben Barsotti Scott, PLA
I’m a landscape architect licensed in the state of New York. I also curate exhibitions, primarily through a collaborative project called Bad Little Brother. And I’m a student of historical geography, currently researching a series of civilian-led blockades of US Navy terminals in the final years of the Vietnam War.
Occasionally, I’m also a teacher and critic at schools of art and architecture: see the syllabus for my course on contemporary architectural theory here. Even more occasionally, my writing appears in architecture and urban geography outlets like the the New York Review of Architecture, Critical Planning Journal, and the Journal of Landscape Architecture. You can see my full CV here.
I live and work in New York City and commute every once in a while to New Jersey.
I post some of my recent and ongoing work on this site. If you’re interested in working together, you can contact me here.
RESEARCH
Anti-Assimilationist Landscape
2017︎︎︎2023
Through a study of two queer contemporary photographers working with landscape imagery, I proposes a theory of “anti-assimilationist landscape”: a politicized rejection of the conventions of landscape imagery and the repressive systems of land ownership, gender, and nation-building it sustains. Collier Schorr and David Benjamin Sherry make landscape images in sites with histories of gendered settler-colonial and white supremacist violence. The essay argues that their works function as both interpretation of those sites and a queer reclamation of them, enacting a political ecology of difference that can allow for a politics outside of the liberal democratic notion of citizenship rights and the fascist notion of ‘blood and soil.’ Arguing for its applicability to landscape architecture theory and practice, I contrast this anti-assimilationist mode to the turn-of-the-millennium concept of ‘eco-revelation,’ proposing instead a queer aesthetics of obscuring and the potential of ‘becoming illegible’ as an environmentalist practice. You can read the article in Journal of Landscape Architecture: “Anti-Assimilationist Landscape: Becoming Illegible as Queer Resistance to State Power.”
Scott, Ben Barsotti.“Anti-Assimilationist Landscape: Becoming Illegible as Queer Resistance to State Power.” Journal of Landscape Architecture 19 (1): 20–33. doi:10.1080/18626033.2024.2408908. All Collier Schorr images were reproduced courtesy of 303 Gallery, New York. All David Benjamin Sherry images were reproduced courtesy of Morán Morán.
