Land Prints, a project by Roberto Rovira, Chair of FIU Landscape Architecture + Environmental and Urban Design, is featured on the cover of the Journal of Landscape Architecture (JoLA) and as part of three double-page spreads in the Theme Issue 2-2014 on Landscape Specifics.
The prints are part of a research project that explores map-making and its relationship to the lands map represent. Metal plates, called “Landprints,” are embedded in the ground and are later removed, painted and sealed to arrest the weathering process. The Landprints show a one-to-one scale image of the landscape whose two-dimensional impression reveals the various processes that transformed it over time. Rovira states, “the Landprints are media that exist at the intersection of land, map, and art, and question the limits of where a map begins and where the land it describes ends.”
JoLA features the Land Prints project as part of its blind peer-reviewed ‘Thinking Eye’ section, which includes images of the prints with an accompanying essay by Rovira. Established in 2006, JoLA is the peer-reviewed academic Journal of the European Council of Landscape Architecture Schools (ECLAS). The journal is published by Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, and is listed in the Web of Science, Thomson Reuters Arts and Humanities Citation Index, among others. JoLA has three issues a year, is published in full color, and also exists online. Cultivated through editorials and reviews, and possessing a unique approach to the graphic design of its content, the aims of JoLA are to provide a platform for outstanding landscape architectural scholarship and research innovation, linking theory to practice. (Source: JoLA)
While publishing articles following established research conventions and written modes of communication, JoLA also encourages and publishes unconventional and emerging forms of research inquiry including those employing practiced-based methodologies, those having their origins in visual and artistic practices and media, and those espousing new method and rigor for the developing field of landscape architectural criticism. JoLA thus gives space to the reflective practitioner and to design research. The journal has different sections in order to accommodate and cultivate this, among them the ‘Under the Sky’ and ‘Thinking Eye’ sections, explicitly underlining the importance of the creative imagination and promoting the thoughtful review of canonical projects and experimental representation as forms of thinking worthy of scientific endeavors. The rich and diverse cultural backgrounds of European Landscape Architecture require exposure to global contexts – JoLA has a European base, but is internationally oriented and seeks to offer global perspectives, both in terms of submissions and readership. In 2009, JoLA received the prestigious ASLA Award of Excellence in Communications. (Source: JoLA)
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