9 Territories

9 Territories is a study of place – a technical and intuitive description of the Salt Lake Valley with a direct and echoing connection to the Great Salt Lake. The project explores the contradiction of our continuous, expansive space coupled with a structured and divided development – the marriage of organic and Cartesian.

9 columns, rendered in layers of plaster and great-salt-lake-salt, exhibit the topographical rise and fall of the the valley. Topography, a function of time and space, barriers and thresholds, of light, speed, shadow, reflection, echo, access, erosion, resolution, orientation, refuge, with jagged edges and a smooth center. The columnar territories contain rise and fall, parsed with our perfect human grid, granting scale, granting orientation, and granting division to that which is otherwise layered, but indivisible.