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STONE QUARRY ART PARK
Stone Quarry Art Park is nestled in the heart of Cazenovia, New York. It is a 100 acre site where the legacy of artist and creator Dorothy Reister lives on. Here, artists from all over the world are invited to create unique works of art that are permanent, semi-permanent, or fully ephemeral.
This semester's studio we focused on microbially-informed design strategies, from first understanding the entire site based on microbial activity, then moving into grand planning again using microbial thinking and programming nodes. The final module will zoom into a one acre scale that highlights a site-specific design.
DATE
FALL 2025
PROJECT LOCATION
STONE QUARRY ART PARK
CAZENOVIA, NEW YORK
PROGRAMS + TOOLS USED
HAND DRAWING, PENCIL/PEN, COLORED PENCIL, DIGITAL CAMERA, AUTOCAD, ILLUSTRATOR, PHOTOSHOP, INDESIGN
LEARNING OUTCOMES
TO UNDERSTAND A SITE THROUGH MICROBIAL ACTIVITY, HOW TO DESIGN WITH MICROBES AND WHAT THEY TELL US ABOUT THE UNIQUE ZONES WITHIN A LANDSCAPE. BASED ON MICROBIALLY INFORMED DESIGN, WE PRACTICED GRAND PLANNING OF THE 100 ACRE SITE AND A SITE-SPECIFIC DESIGN AT A 1 ACRE SCALE.
P01| Mapping Vectors
Each student was assigned a specific vector to map; soils, water, sunlight, disturbance...etc.
I was assigned 'disturbance'. It was entirely up to me to define what kind of disturbance, where and at what intensity.
P02 | Natural Ink Making + Mapping a Microbial Process
We learned how to make natural inks from local and seasonal materials and other household items on hand. Natural materials like, black walnut hulls, oak galls, pokeweed, buckthorn, blueberries, spinach and turmeric. Adding manipulators that would interact with the ink, making it more acidic or more basic, such as alum, baking soda, iron, and citric acid. Together these processes reflected the microbial processes that we focused on understanding more about through this semester long studio. These pH changing visualizations through the inks themselves and on the paper, showed us how they would change over time, within seconds, minutes, days and weeks.
Final synthesis board of this iteration, microbially informed mapping of the entire art park.
Through the vectors of decay and mycorrhizal networks, this map below reflects
the hot spots of where these processes take place in abundance and complexity.
P03 | Grand Planning
This iteration focused on grand planning, the Stone Quarry Art Park in Cazenovia, NY, is roughly 102 acres, there is a lot to understand and plan for when working on this scale. It gave us each an opportunity to think about the big picture and think on a broad scale before the final iteration which was going to focus on a one-acre site-specific scale.
Guided Grand Planning Workshop
These sketches were part of a 90 minute guided grand planning workshop session. We each were prompted with a specific consideration to address; circulation, maintenance, our microbial process(es), uses and programming, overall synthesis, etc.
This allowed us to effectively, without over thinking, begin to document and process our ideas based on all that we knew so far about the park, its history, ongoing uses and meaning to the community, and its future as an iconic and historic destination in the cozy town of Cazenovia, New York.
My ultimate take away from this workshop was what you see in the 'synthesis' page; it highlighted to be three main hubs of human visitorship and activation, surrounded by these very bucolic and serene natures experiences. This realization helped informed the grand planning stage and also enhanced my site-specific design.
Initial hand drawn sketch of grand planning ideas, nodes, and zones.
Finalized synthesis board of grand planning iteration showing zones with labels for all 100 acres.
Orange indicates proposed and added elements. Green and gray elements indicate existing conditions that will be kept and are part of the current landscape of the park. Close up of sections that show the landscape from the parking lot to the artist lodge as you walk from the parking lot to the artist lodge, while the artist lodge gets closer and closer as viewer walks further away from the parking lot.
P04 | SITE-SPECIFIC DESIGN ITERATION
This iteration focused on grand planning, the Stone Quarry Art Park in Cazenovia, NY, is roughly 102 acres, there is a lot to understand and plan for when working on this scale. It gave us each an opportunity to think about the big picture and think on a broad scale before the final iteration which was going to focus on a one-acre site-specific scale.
First iteration of site-specific design.
Second iteration of site-specific design.
Third iteration of site-specific design. This ended up being the iteration I moved forward with for the final project.
Final synthesis board one.
Final synthesis board two.
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