MMPA had the privilege to collaborate with contemporary composer Barry R. Morse with our Spiritual Ecology exhibition in 2023..  He composed an excellent composition that spoke to the the principals of the movement and the entirety of the works we exhibited.  Since then, Morse is busily composing another piece that will compliment our upcoming exhibition Home and Place (in our new home on Commercial street).  Our goal is to open the first week of June - permitting and construction notwithstanding. The book you see here is another of his creative ventures. It is brand new and available in our store.  

Leave it to composer Barry Morse to illustrate to us a new way of looking at design solutions inspired by the art of chance and nature itself.  Indeterminacy incorporated in design, art making and music is seen as unconventional but as Morse points out, it speaks to the essence of the  creative process.  Bravo to his genius for applying it to landscape architecture and this well chartered book that explains his influences and position.  - Denise Froehlich, Director of MMPA

The creative use of indeterminacy, that is, “chance,” is an often-overlooked design opportunity despite the universality of chance in art, nature, science, and life. How can “chance,” a seemingly capricious phenomenon, be made to work for someone? One controlled use of chance is through the Chinese I Ching “chance operations” method of composer and artist John Cage (1912–1992). This book addresses the questions of how one might approach using this method in landscape architectural design, what the outcome of such an indeterminate design would be, and whether or not it could lead to a viable constructed landscape.

In addition, this book answers the question: What is the relationship between the I Ching, John Cage, and the constructed landscape anyway? The final product of the exploration of this method is a new hypothetical redesign of an existing plaza using Cage’s techniques and a comparative evaluation of the new indeterminate concept and the two pre-existing designs, using the original program objectives as a guide against which the three designs can be judged for effectiveness.