Laurie Olin is a distinguished teacher, author, and one of the most renowned landscape architects practicing today. He is currently Practice Professor of Landscape Architecture in the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. Olin’s numerous award-winning design projects include campuses, urban design, and parks. His work extends to Bryant Park and Battery Park City in New York City; the J. Paul Getty Center in Los Angeles, California; and social housing in Frankfurt, Germany. Olin’s major planning and design projects at academic institutions include the University of Pennsylvania, Yale University, Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and most recently a new campus plan for Harvard University in Allston, Massachusetts. He is a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, an American Academy of Rome Fellow, an honorary member of the American Institute of Architects, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the 1999 Wyck-Strickland Award recipient, and a Fellow of the ASLA.

Artist Statement: These two drawings were made on Great Wass Island, Maine, in 2007. They were made with a stick cut on the site, dipped in India ink on white charcoal paper.

One depicts the granite shoreline with the spruce forest ubiquitous to the coastal islands “Down East” from Bar Harbor. The other is a close study of the peeling trunk of a paper birch, which spring up on the edges of wetlands and in clearings that occur in this forest. Both were very evocative for Olin of the landscape of his youth and early professional career in the Pacific northwest and are from a group of approximately twenty drawings done while staying on this island near Jonesport.

Olin has experimented with various drawing techniques and materials throughout his career, recently writing that it isn’t really a matter of the tools so much as the eye and thinking that makes for good drawings. See his forthcoming essay in Drawing/Thinking, edited by Marc Treib and published by Taylor and Francis this autumn.