Professor Jonathan A. Scelsa with his office op.Architecture Landscape, @oparchland and Adjunct Associate Professor Cathryn Dwyre with her office Pneumastudio each present new work at the Handwerker Gallery at Ithaca College as part of the exhibition, Section as Cosmogram: From The Heavens to the Earth, curated by David Salomon. This exhibition assembles section drawings by contemporary architects and landscape architects depicting the real and imaginary relationships between the heavens and the earth. These two categories are broadly conceived to encompass phenomena that include: the universe and the underworld, the environment and the economy, the atmosphere and the soil, the microscopic and the mythological, the ephemeral and the eternal, the scientific and the spiritual. In other words, it assembles sections that perform as cosmograms.
op.AL’s drawing, Sogo Bia’s Pyre, informs a new type of conservation for the National Parks, that reconnects the contemporary traveler with an energy practice between the celestial and the terrestrial. Borrowing from past forest management practices, the station re-deploys the firewatch tower to house a Methane Pyrolysis reactor, lodged in the earth’s crust. Powered by the geothermal energy of the Supervolcanic mantle below, the reactor processes methane, flown by air from the Bison rutting grounds of Lamar Valley, where their excrement is gathered, scrubbed, and Anaerobically Digested. The fires cleanly separate that gas into its two elemental compounds of liquid hydrogen carted away for Park energy consumption, and solidified carbon, distributed as bio-char back to the forest ground by drone. Sitting above this modern hypocaust are saunas and baths, where the eco-tourist is immersed in both machines and nature. Crowned with a panoramic ribbon window lookout, Sogo Bia’s Pyre provides our viewers a new type of watch, one that allows for the bathing in our edenic landscapes, infernal delights, and the heavens above. This drawing was created with the aid of Heet Desai B.Arch 2027, and Balbina Cantu-Garza B.Arch 2025.
Pneumastudio’s eden.exe explores the section drawing as ‘cosmogram’ by imagining a not-too-distant future in which biology, geology, and technology conspire in the artfully cannibalized repurposing of a posthuman world. Living things here seem foreign, from the red soil layer transported by trade winds from Africa’s Sahara Desert, to the peculiar vegetation inadvertently seeded by centuries of pirates existing alongside the curiously native pink flamingo Phoenicopterus ruber. The refiguring of this Bahamian paradise, a youthful 150 million-year-old carbonate landform (a holey platform topped by younger wind-born dune sediments) begins with rainwater and its dissolved atmospheric CO2 slowly carving underworld realms. eden.exe was developed from a 3D scan conducted via drone of a site on the island of Eleuthera. The drawing combines a digital rendering of the site topology blanketed in the polka-dotted peeling bark of the native Gumbo limbo tree, ecologically staged with collage elements from 18th century natural history texts. Species include both real (bioluminescent Pholas dactylus) and mythical specimens (the cave-dwelling Hydra lernaea), a gatekeeper to the Underworld whose capacity to infinitely regenerate heads inspired an ancient Greek expression Ὕδραν τέμνειν” used to describe tasks that are hopeless or endlessly futile.
The exhibition is open from August 28 – October 1, 2025 and the full list of exhibitors includes: Ants of the Prairie, Bureau Spectacular, Seth Denizen, Harrison Atelier, José Ibarra, Ibañez Kim, Ferda Kolatan, Mélanie Louterbach, Lucito, Mathur/Da Cunha, NaJa & deOstos, Ciro Najle, NEMESTUDIO, op.AL, PEG office of landscape + architecture, pneumastudio, RVTR, SCAPE, SITE/James Wines, Smout Allen, Society of Cartographic Objects, Penny Unni, Ann Weber & Cornell Landscape Architecture, Z4A .
