![]() ![]() And then, give it a hundred years,’” she said. “Oftentimes when I put an earthwork in, I say, ‘Give it a few years. Ghost Forest is a temporary, grounded offshoot of sorts for What Is Missing?, though on a much shorter timeframe than Lin’s preferred window. Since 2012, Lin has run a multi-site project she considers her final memorial: What Is Missing? a shape-shifting digital tribute to biodiversity and habitat loss which provides oft-missing shape for what development and climate change hath taken away – a map pinpoint for the extinction of Florida’s Dusky Seaside Sparrow, for example, or a crowd-sourced memory of dwindling butterfly populations off the coast of Maine. Lin’s work has long melded art with architecture and sustainable design, from the undulating ripples of Wavefield at Storm King to, most recently, the $120m overhaul of Smith College’s Neilson Library – originally designed in 1893 by Frederick Law Olmsted, the chief landscape architect of Manhattan’s Central Park – unveiled earlier this year. Her political consciousness was “all about: can we be gentler on nature and the natural world”, she said, “and then in my art, it’s always been about getting you to pay closer attention to literally what’s under your feet”. Lin’s formative years in the 60s and 70s were shaped by the burgeoning environmental movement, a value system of conservation inextricable from her professional work as an architect. “Because I was surrounded by woods – and it was magical, the oak trees were towering – I could be found as a high-schooler, as a grade-schooler, at a parking lot of Kroger’s and AMP petitioning to save the whales and boycott Japan,” she said. The imposing otherworldliness of trees, in particular, inspired Lin’s earliest faith in the sanctity of the natural world and the urgency of environmental preservation. ![]() As a child, “my playground was the backwoods,” she said. The use of towering trees as material is a full-circle moment for Lin, who grew up surrounded by hilly woodlands in Athens, Ohio, in the state’s eastern Appalachian region (her parents were both professors at Ohio University). “But the problem is if we don’t accurately remember the past, how can we help reinvent and define a different future?” “Technically what I’m drawn to in history is accurately remembering the past, because it’s got to teach us a different future,” Lin told the Guardian. With Ghost Forest, Lin has constructed a striking, meditative memorial to biodiversity loss and the ecological ravages of climate change, a literally dying shadow of Manhattan’s wooded past that also lends itself to a midday stroll or picnic. Photograph: Courtesy the artist and Madison Square Park Conservancy / Andy Romer ![]() ![]() (The monument made Lin an overnight star in the architecture world when, as a 21-year-old senior at Yale, she beat out 1,420 proposals for the commission in 1981.) Coastal cedars such as the 49 Lin calls her “gentle giants” used to abound on the eastern seaboard, but habitat loss and climate change have hemmed the species into now just a mere 50,000 acres.Īs an architect, Lin, 61, is most widely known for her memorials, works which convey loss at mass scale through stark, graceful minimalism: the circular fountain-cum-timeline for the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, or the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, a solemn gash in the earth lined with black stone and over 58,000 names whose aesthetic still moves viewers to silent contemplation four decades on. Lin’s Ghost Forest, hosted in the park until 14 November, takes it name from the ecological phenomenon in which large swaths of woodland are killed off at once by rapid environmental degradation, be it invasive species or saltwater inundation as sea levels rise. The urban forest recalls the island’s pre-city past as a dense woodland teeming with birdsong and animals larger than rats, and stands as a sort of slow-rolling funeral – the 49 trees, all about 80 years old, are still technically alive but will die completely within about two years, the victim of saltwater tree rot from rising sea levels in New Jersey’s coastal Pine Barrens region. ![]()
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