UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Landscape architect Ken Smith will present a lecture, "NORMCORE: CONFLATION: NORMAL / HARDCORE," on April 6, the Stuckeman School Jury Space.
Smith is one of the best-known of a generation of landscape architects equally at home in the worlds of art, architecture and urbanism. Trained in both design and the fine arts, he explores the relationship between art, contemporary culture and landscape. His practice, Ken Smith Workshop, was established in 1992 and is based in New York City.
NORMCORE is a contemporary phenomenon, particularly in the fashion world, where common, ordinary or street fashion is elevated and transformed with new content and signification through artistic appropriation and manipulation. NORMCORE conflates normal and hardcore. NORMCORE typically takes the common bland normal and infuses it with wit, irony and craft.
This lecture of the installation looks at the issues of NORMCORE aesthetics and critique in landscape design. What is normal in the profession and industry and what are the contemporary cultural conditions and questions that might be explored through NORMCORE inquiry, reworking and commentary?