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.
Garden Things Make Excesses
2017
Garden things are discrete, different, and unassimilable. In a mosh pit, I am subsumed, not assimilated. I make the energy and the energy makes and takes me. There’s something magical to submitting to it, and something tender in knowing that it’ll dissolve soon. Is that like a garden? Temporary, phony, slightly sublime, a little bit effervescent, a little bit violent, and intimate because the only way to get it is to give up a bit of yourself and take up a bit of something else?
This is the ridiculous sublime. A Hawaiian shirt makes space through discrete clumps of things. Things fold into each other, stitched into an uneasy and unwholesome fabric. They are different, discrete, dis-integrated.
The song is a phenomenon, an agent made in the friction, the frisson, the electric charge between things. Teenagers imitate, and garden things inspire imitation: we imitate a stiff pylon by leaning against it; we imitate a leaning shrub by leaning away from it. And we participate in making excesses: we make heat, friction, moisture, noise; we move and move around other things. As people gather in the spaces of this garden, they change those conditions and are changed by them. And in being open to that change, and understanding our relationship with other things that are also changing, we might momentarily understand ourselves as things; and that can be a radical act of sympathy.
