abstract: Western landscape photography helped to create an imaginative perception of a new nation for Americans. Early nineteenth-century photographers captured a vision of uncharted terrain that metaphorically fulfilled a two-fold illusion: an untouched Eden and a land ready and waiting for white settlement. The sublime and picturesque experiences of the West provided artists a concept that could be capitalized upon by employing various forms of manipulation. In the twentieth-century, the role of landscape photography evolved as did the advancement of the West. Images of wilderness became art and photographers chose to view the western landscape differently. Some focused more sharply and critically on the relationship between the land and the people who lived on it. The influential exhibition in 1975, New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape presented work that showed a landscape altered, marked by power lines, houses, and fences. The West as Eden no longer existed. Today, photographers continue to examine, image, and experience western land anew. In this thesis I examine the relationship of contemporary landscape photography and the role of the West, guided by an analysis that traces the history of American ideologies and attitudes toward natural land. The artists I have chosen recognize landscape not as scenery but as the spaces and systems people inhabit, and use manipulative strategies that emphasize an artificial character of the West. Their work elicits antecedent mythologies, pictorial models, and American ideologies that continue to perpetuate internationally. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.A. Art History 2013

Stockholm is built on top of a rare landscape phenomenon: At the ridge of an esker crossing where the sweet water of Mälaren meets the brakish of the Baltic sea. An absolute ecological melting pot, not to be found anywhere else in this part of the world.  Due to the development of Stockholm, the nature of what takes place here has over the past 800 years slowly been lost in the citys urban web. As the citys development continues and generates a land-mass-bi-product in shape of blast stone. -Could the ecology of this rare aquatic environment connecting sweet and brakish be regenerated if the connection was recreated artificially with excess blast stone?

The thesis investigates alternative visions of democracy through a design project that allows different public groups and individuals to more actively participate in the political realm. The site for the proposed project is the UN Headquarters in New York City, chosen for its juxtaposition of old and new world orders. The project manifests its vision through an architectural representation intended as a platform of multiplicities. Using tools from the backdrop of everyday life: security needs and communication, it attempts to break the static nature of the UN by making it more interactive--like the borderless, virtual world of the Internet we increasingly inhabit today-- and through its new architectural framework to create a self-perpetuating system for social justice.

The thesis investigates alternative visions of democracy through a design project that allows different public groups and individuals to more actively participate in the political realm. The site for the proposed project is the UN Headquarters in New York City, chosen for its juxtaposition of old and new world orders. The project manifests its vision through an architectural representation intended as a platform of multiplicities. Using tools from the backdrop of everyday life: security needs and communication, it attempts to break the static nature of the UN by making it more interactive--like the borderless, virtual world of the Internet we increasingly inhabit today-- and through its new architectural framework to create a self-perpetuating system for social justice.