Overlook: Exploring the Internal Fringes of America with the Center for Land Use Interpretation

The Center for Land Use Interpretation is a research-based educational organization that produces public programs about the built landscape of the United States from its sites in Los Angeles, Utah and the Mojave desert, with an upstate New York location opening in 2006. The Center's aim is to increase and diffuse information about how the nation's lands are apportioned, utilized and perceived. Recent examples of their work include a two-day "Tour of the Monuments of the Great American Void" by bus and the exhibit Immersed Remains: Towns Submerged in America. This book takes readers on a tour through the strangely unfamiliar land that Americans live in, demonstrating that we can understand ourselves and the nation by examining the clues on display all around us, often clearly visible but ignored. Each chapter explores a different topic, from an in-depth look at Ohio ("the most all-American state"); through scale shifts in model landscapes, exemplified in the three largest hydraulic models in the world; and law-enforcement training environments that "simulate" public space. Readers can dive into the hidden and enchanting world of show caves, where America is on display underground; and come up into the Great Basin, a zone covering most of Nevada, and portions of Utah, California, Oregon, Idaho and Mexico, whose network of watersheds has no outlet to the ocean. Following lines and edges, through cities, suburbs, small towns and wide-open spaces, the Center guides us upstream, toward the heart of another America--the same, but different.

From The Los Angeles Times

MAYBE you've never yearned for a tour of Mingo Junction, the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant and the rest of industrial Ohio. Maybe you were ready to start 2007 without an understanding of the interplay of nature and architecture in the show caves of Kentucky, Missouri and New Mexico. And maybe you've never cared about just what goes on in that odd little Culver City institution that calls itself CLUI. Yet still you may find yourself absorbed by "Overlook: Exploring the Internal Fringes of America With the Center for Land Use Interpretation," a coffee-table chronicle of land-use curiosities edited by Matthew Coolidge and Sarah Simons with an essay by Ralph Rugoff. The hallmarks of this 264-page, 8-by-10-inch paperback volume are deadpan descriptions and anonymous photography, all detailing weird, wonderful and (mostly) horrific things Americans have done to their landscape, including deliberately flooding the town of Neversink, N.Y., and practice-bombing Nevada. And here's the key to the CLUI way: Coolidge (CLUI's founder-director) and Simons would never use the word "horrific" in print, and probably not "ugly" either. In fact, their work stands out first for their embrace of territory that most Americans have either stopped seeing or never thought to look for and second for their refusal to make judgments....Coolidge and Simons have gone to great lengths to tell you where these things happen and what these places look like... But when it comes to forming an opinion or guessing at what these folks are driving at, that's our responsibility...it's provocative and even devious in an unprovable sort of way. In these days of polarized politics, hollering television heads and bullying bloggers, what could be more subversive than stacked facts and withheld opinions? --Christopher Reynolds, The Los Angeles Times