Miller House and Garden Talk
Quintessentially Modern—and Midwestern:
Landscape Typologies and Cultural Memes in the
Miller House and Garden, Columbus, Indiana
Peter Osler, speaker
Sunday, October 1, 2023
2:00 – 3:30 PM Eastern
Ann Arbor District Library Downtown
353 S. 5th Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI 48204
4th Floor Meeting Room
Admission is free, there is no need to register in advance
Long hailed as one the most iconic works of mid-20th-century American design, the J. Irwin and Xenia Miller residence (1957) is noted for its material and formal elegance. While the designers—and indeed, the client—for this project were of global importance in both reach and influence, Peter Osler, Architect and Site Designer, FAAR, will present a less common reading of this landmark, emphasizing its abstraction of familiar midwestern landscape typologies and cultural memes.
About the speaker: Peter Osler was born into a family with farmers on one side and an obscene number of architects on the other, and has spent his peripatetic adult life as a spatial practitioner and part time academician. He has lived in Ann Arbor—his birthplace, as well as that of his parents—for two-thirds of his life, but has also enjoyed stops in Bloomington, Indiana; Cambridge & Boston; San Francisco; Chicago; Champaign-Urbana; and Rome, Italy. He has taught at the University of Michigan (where he received his B.S. in Natural Resources and where he was Associate Professor of Practice at the Taubman College), the University of Illinois, the Escola Tecnica Superior d’Architectura in Barcelona (ETSAB), the Harvard Graduate School of Design (where he received his professional training in both landscape architecture and architecture), the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he directed the Master of Landscape Architecture Program for its first seven years, and most recently, Washington University, St Louis. He is currently developing a landscape design curriculum for the Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility, to improve both employment opportunities for, and the dignity of, its inmates and returning citizens. Osler’s academic interests are focused on modernist site planning and landscape materiality, especially plants as historical and cultural ciphers, their potential as a contemporary art medium, and their maintenance as an untapped source of poetics–a subject about which he has lectured widely, at venues such as the Arts Club of Chicago, the University of British Columbia, Ohio State University, and Harvard.
Professionally, he has worked in architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design practices large and small, and as Campus Landscape Architect and Planner at the Cranbrook Educational Community. He works at a wide variety of landscape types and scales, both as a sole practitioner and in collaboration with larger firms. Recent completed projects range in scale from the outdoor spaces of Title Town in Green Bay, Wisconsin (in collaboration with Design Workshop), which won the Merit Award from state ASLA chapters of Illinois, Wisconsin, and Colorado, to sculptural stainless steel furniture for the Knight Wallace Journalism Fellowship program at the University of Michigan. His designs have been published in the United States, Europe, and Asia, and he has been an invited juror at universities throughout the U.S and in Europe. Having won the Rome Prize in landscape architecture, he is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome.
Peter’s sister, Molly Osler, was a long-time a2modern board member until her passing in 2019.