Limit Cases

We traveled through the American southwest for 28 days.The trip consisted of 3700 miles (a figure 8 of sorts). We passed through NM, UT, CO, AZ and NV. Sites included: Santa Fe, Taos, Chaco Canyon, Monument Valley, Sundance, Bryce Canyon, Bingham Copper Pit, The Great Salt Lake, the Spiral Jetty, Brigham City, the Sun Tunnels, Wendover / The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), Moab, Telluride, Mesa Verde, the Lightning Field, the Very Large Array, andWhite Sands National Monument/Missile Range.

We selected sites that would offer us experiences of intensity: intensity of landscape, color, climate, remoteness, shape, history, and site-responsive built environments. We found ourselves arriving at sites where humans, the landscape and the built environment converged to create exquisitely concentrated zones of contact. State borderlines converged with deep economic divisions; remote desert "wasteland" converged with garish tourist attractions; a quonset hut used to develop the atomic bomb converged with present day efforts to redesign it for sustainable living practices in the desert.

The experiences compounded and we began to regard such moments as "limit cases": intense points where natural and built forces mutually contaminate as they play out to their most extreme forms, levels, and
junctures.

The postcard format echoes our experience of continuous movement for 28 days. They are signals sent from our encounters with moments that necessitate extraordinary acts of creativity and responsiveness. Taken together they visualize the sensation of our own passing though and of the sites themselves reaching their "limits" and passing into something else.