Associate Professor Jane Wolff's Bay Lexicon — commissioned by the Exploratorium of San Francisco as a original artwork for the opening of its new building — will be the focus of a week-long series of public programmes at the Exploratorium in October. 

The project, a visual dictionary made up of illustrated flash cards, defines a working vocabulary for observing, exploring, and coming to terms with the complicated environment of San Francisco Bay. Its premise is that language is the first tool for perception: we cannot recognize what we cannot name.

Every card is an invitation to look closely at the landscape and to wonder about its meanings. The cards’ display cart serves as an orientation device. It includes a map of San Francisco’s dynamic shoreline and drawings of the views from the gallery so that viewers can identify the flash cards’ locations in the landscape. Designed to move around the gallery and into the city, the project will serve as a field guide for tours of the Bay Observatory and the shoreline beyond.

Wolff's interest in helping people better understand landscape and the environment is also reflected in a lecture she gave as a key speaker at the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects 2013 conference, Reform, in Sydney. The conference was organized to "reflect the urgency of actions required by all built environment design professions in addressing the present and pending environmental, economic, cultural and social issues confronting our cities, towns, regional and rural places." Her talk, "Agency, Advocacy, Vocabulary: Three landscape projects," addressed the urgent need for designers to develop nuanced, technically sophisticated, widely accessible language to describe hybrid landscapes to their multiple constituencies.

For more information about the conference, please see the AILA website.