Land Art Generator 2016 Santa Monica: Powering Places in Southern California

The Land Art Generator Initiative is delighted to announce that LAGI 2016 will be held in Southern California, with the City of Santa Monica as site partner. This free and open call ideas competition invites individuals or interdisciplinary teams to design a large-scale site-specific work of public art that also serves as clean energy and/or drinking water infrastructure for the City of Santa Monica.

The complete Design Guidelines along with CAD files, photos, and more will be available on January 1, 2016 at http://landartgenerator.org/designcomp

The design site includes the breakwater adjacent to the historic Santa Monica Pier and offers the opportunity to utilize wave and tidal energy as well as wind, solar, and other technologies.

Throughout 2016, LAGI will hold numerous events showcasing the submissions and the design ideas they contain. Public programming will reach a broad demographic throughout Los Angeles County and beyond with exhibitions, panel discussions, lectures, publications, and more related to the science of energy as experienced through art.

Through a generous partnership with the LA Chapter of the US Green Building Council, the award ceremony, exhibition, and book launch will be in Los Angeles during October of 2016 at Greenbuild 2016. A concurrent exhibition will be located at the Santa Monica pier.

Following the successful model of past LAGI competitions (see http://landartgenerator.org/ for more information) there will be a book (published by Prestel) that documents 60 of the design solutions and provides a rich contextual framework with essays on art and energy.

LAGI 2016 comes to Southern California at an important time. The sustainable infrastructure that is required to meet California’s development goals and growing population will have a profound influence on the landscape. LAGI 2016 is meant to provide a positive and proactive vision of how these new infrastructures can be enhancements to our most cherished places. Whether providing clean and renewable electricity to power our homes and automobiles, or providing the clean water so vital to our survival, public services are at their brightest when they can be a celebrated component of urban planning and development.

As California works to achieve its important renewable energy portfolio goal (raised to 50% by 2030 in the governor’s January 5, 2015 State of the State Address) large-scale exurban generation will be increasingly augmented by urban micro-generation. As the infrastructures that will cleanly power our future productivity become more prevalent in our commercial and residential centers, the issue of their aesthetic integration becomes more important.

Power plants, once unseen and forgotten, will become an integral part of our daily lives. Embracing this fact, the time is now to proactively address the influence of these new machines on the built environment, and imagine a future in which clean energy technologies have been intentionally designed into well-planned cities. The biennial LAGI competition seeks to showcase how utility-scale renewable energy infrastructures can be seen not only as engineered machines, but also as conceptual landscape elements, placemaking tools, and destinations for tourism and recreation.