Recent Events - K. Lair
The bulk of creative practice at WAS has been in the adaptive reuse of the barn and surrounding site. The the project has been a long unwinding effort but the last three summers have been increasingly focused on creating a live/working studio that expresses the essences of the place through materials, methods and the future of the project. The design/build work can be followed on instagram and here.
Experimenting in stone .... practice 08/21
Drawing studies on Tending - Fire Ecology and ReCreative Landscapes
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Two sides of the large panel for hybrid (dimensional painting) . This is in the Implement Series.
07/01/18 One of the sections propped up for photo. The piece will have a support scaffold to hold in place eventually to replace the structurally assembly and original configuration of the work.
06/03/18 Work in progress - This is a reworking of a sculpture. The piece has been separated into 4 components that are being painted individually in the farm implement paint. This piece is the most developed of the 4 so far. Each piece will have its own support scaffold, however, this will likely rest on a base off the ground similar to the the concrete blocks are doing now.
Work in progress
Work in progress
Aired 11/03/17 - Green City hosted by Lynnae M. Hentzen on 98.9 KFMG. Green City is a special program and Lynnae has been making an important difference in the world of sustainable communities for many years.
Kevin Lair will be exhibiting work in Instinct Gallery in downtown Minneapolis, MN from September 26th to November 14th, 2015. An opening for the exhibition Telescope will on Sept 26th.
His exhibition Gateway - The Three Rivers Country will open on Sept 26th (also) and close October 31st at the Madison County Historical Complex in Winterset, Iowa.
co-director, Kevin Lair
architecture of co-habitation
K.Lair. WAS - GrottoStoneStudy, 2015
K. Lair. GrottoStoneStudy 01, 2015
Work in Progress
At the Westbrook Artists’ Site (WAS) I am currently working on integrating on-going investigations into the environmental history and native ecology with an architectural perspective of co-habitation. Our practices of human habitation are typically exclusive of non-humans and co-habitation. In some rare cases, exceptions are made but they often mean displacement of or endangerment to the non-humans. In even more rare cases humans are excluded at least temporarily. None of these approaches actually engenders meaningful understanding or leverages opportunities that might lead to a more holistic and long-term approach. We have to address our values as well as our basic understandings.
Since entering graduate school to study architecture in 1991, I have yet to encounter an architectural site model or design brief that incorporated non-human habitat. I am sure they exist (or existed) but they are rare exceptions. Architects, engineers, and others are looking for new ways to incorporate living organisms and processes into the built environment. Most of these efforts, however, are through a technological appropriation and re-creation of an ecological system. They don’t engage ecology or the non-human on its own terms but rather as a raw resource to be transformed by human labor and desire. I hope to shift our focus by advocating for encounters and engagement that decenters the human and seeks a more ethical and sustainable outcome. In addition, we can have a far richer experience if we can become more attuned to the world around us starting with a mission of equitable co-habitation.
One of the first areas of investigation at WAS has been the reintroduction of fire as part of native ecology. Ironically, human-initiated fire became over thousands of years fully integrated into native systems. However, key to this transformation is that it occurred through pre-industrialized methods, speed, and scale. Fire presents a real hazard and potential disregard for the boundaries associated with private property and permanent settlement. Of course, we have only replaced the more dynamic and visible hazard of fire with other, more profitable hazards that only appear to respect boundaries. The return of fire as an essential part of native ecology is one of the ways we can start to redesign human habitation around co-habitation with the non-human.
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Crawfish home outside of Bloomington, IN - from course on the Non-human, Emily Weihing, 2014
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In a few generations since we left the land we've lost all awareness of the
people-to-land relationship
- Malcolm Wells
The native American people of Iowa lived as tribes with 1,000 to 2,000 people. This low density of human population afforded a diverse, resilient ecology that we have since replaced with a fragile, fragmented and degraded one. Decades ago the architect Malcolm Wells developed an early standard for environmental protection that used "Wilderness" as the datum for sustainability. Unfortunately, we replaced this focus with a more business as usual approach that supports human-centered technology as the driver for "sustainability". My work at WAS revisits the work of Wells as a way to redress the more fundamental issues facing us in an ethical practice of architecture today. This current effort is part of the general approach to design process and creative inquiry.
K.Lair. Study after M. Wells on architecture in farmland, 2015
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K.Lair. Study after M. Wells on architecture in farmland, 2015
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Building almost any land-saving option would be better than what we are doing.
- M. Wells. Gentle Architecture, 1982.
Creative Inquiry
My research and creative activity focuses on issues of ecological sustainability/resilience. I take inspiration from the directive provided in Mechanical and Electrical Equipment for Buildings (Stein, Reynolds, Grondzik, & Kwok, 2005):
What absolutely must change in the coming decades are the values and philosophy that underlie the design process. To meet the challenges of the coming decades, it is critical that designers consider and adopt values appropriate to the nature of the problems being confronted - both at the individual project scale and globally. Nothing less makes sense.
The authors note the obvious and that is little has changed and that our current unsustainable practices continue as we fail to address our values and behaviors. What I believe is called for is what Tony Fry called, a “redirective” practice. I have used similar concepts of design activism, systems-based thinking, and spatial agency but this is a critical practice addressing what leads us to produce and consume in unsustainable and unethical ways. The “redirective”practice is a shift from merely seeking more “sustainable” production that ultimately relies on technology and consumption to perpetuate growth. At times is may be a minor shift but in other ways it is a profound adjustment that is transforming my perspective and work.
I strive to integrate design practice and theory into creative place-making and community-engaged design. You will find in my research summary an overview of how this work is currently developing and the additional projects I am exploring which concern innovation and design entrepreneurship. However, let me first establish a context for my research and creative activity. Some people characterize design research as borrowing research methods from other disciplines then applying them to subject material that is perceived as part of design disciplines. In such a view design research is distinct from design. In order to be able to design effectively, designers are seen as engaging in a more “pragmatic research” process than the “design researcher”. This pragmatic research is usually discarded as merely ephemera in the process of design and not methodical or rigorous enough to be generalizable. Conversely, the designer often eschews the design researchers’ work as not being contextually relevant or applicable. I, on the other hand, often use the term “creative inquiry” as a way to avoid the confusion about what exactly is meant by “design research.”
Creative inquiry is the process of design research from a design methodology. Pragmatic research is another term that describes the research that does not meet scientific standards and instead is designed to fit the particular contextual approaches associated with design. Without this core understanding some have misunderstood my work as divergent with distinct boundaries of manufacturing, healthcare, design studies, sustainability, IT, photography, fine art, and building technology. However, my work has been consistently focused on innovation and the design process and application regardless of the specific subject matter I have explored. In addition, despite appearances, the core focus of most of the subject matter falls within the realm of sustainability. My work has progressed over time and addresses more cultural, historic and ecological aspects that are fundamental in developing and implementing sustainable conditions.
Bio sketch -
Kevin Lair’s work engages environmental history as part of creative inquiry undertaken at the Westbrook Artists' Site (WAS), a collaborative arts venture in central Iowa, part of what was once the great North American tall grass prairie. In 2013, Lair relaunched WAS and deepened its mission, focusing on the history and condition of the land itself, to provide an experiential laboratory for exploration of the post-industrial rural condition. He taught architecture at Iowa State and Syracuse Universities focusing on community based collaborations and design for the environment. He currently teaches art and design at Indiana University where he created immersive workshops on post-industrial environments as places of creative potential. A book of his art and efforts to bring the existential fragility of the rural experience into engagement with the lively, textural nature of the material world is forthcoming with Culicade Press.
He organized the Field Day - Demonstration and Prairie Burn in fall of 2014 at WAS. He will be presented a paper and poster at the 2015 Midwest Conference organized by the Tallgrass, Oak Savanna Fire Science Consortium (TPOS) addressed some aspects of the community-based efforts in Madison County, Iowa. He is currently working on new projects for WAS including a project at the site of one of the first settlers to Madison County. In the fall of 2015 he will be exhibiting work at Instinct Gallery in Minneapolis and the Madison County Historical Complex in Winterset, Iowa.
Kevin Lair’s work engages environmental history as part of creative inquiry undertaken at the Westbrook Artists' Site (WAS), a collaborative arts venture in central Iowa, part of what was once the great North American tall grass prairie. In 2013, Lair relaunched WAS and deepened its mission, focusing on the history and condition of the land itself, to provide an experiential laboratory for exploration of the post-industrial rural condition. He taught architecture at Iowa State and Syracuse Universities focusing on community based collaborations and design for the environment. He currently teaches art and design at Indiana University where he created immersive workshops on post-industrial environments as places of creative potential. A book of his art and efforts to bring the existential fragility of the rural experience into engagement with the lively, textural nature of the material world is forthcoming with Culicade Press.
He organized the Field Day - Demonstration and Prairie Burn in fall of 2014 at WAS. He will be presented a paper and poster at the 2015 Midwest Conference organized by the Tallgrass, Oak Savanna Fire Science Consortium (TPOS) addressed some aspects of the community-based efforts in Madison County, Iowa. He is currently working on new projects for WAS including a project at the site of one of the first settlers to Madison County. In the fall of 2015 he will be exhibiting work at Instinct Gallery in Minneapolis and the Madison County Historical Complex in Winterset, Iowa.
