Groundswell: Constructing the Contemporary Landscape presents twenty-three landscape-design projects that reveal the surge of creativity and critical debate in the design of public spaces, from small urban plazas to large parks for post-industrial sites to long-range plans for entire urban sectors. In the last twenty years, the most significant new landscapes have been designed for sites that were reclaimed from conflict, degradation, or abandonment. The projects, located throughout North America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, were selected for their outstanding design and to show
a variety of scales, contexts, materials, and types of spaces found in the contemporary landscape. Many of the projects' transformations are tracked through before-and-after visuals to underscore these dramatic shifts in use and topography. Models, drawings, and photographs are complemented by large-scale video projections - many created for the exhibition - conveying the space, time, context, material, and palette of each project.

The exhibition is the third in a series of five exhibitions made possible by The Lily Auchincloss Fund for Contemporary Architecture.