Robert Gerard Pietrusko is a designer, composer, and educator. His research focuses on geographic representation and the history of spatial data sets. His design work is part of the permanent collection of the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain in Paris and has been exhibited in more than 15 countries at venues such as MoMA, ZKM Center for Art & Media, and the Venice Architecture Biennale, among others. Pietrusko is currently an associate professor of landscape architecture at Harvard University, and a visiting faculty member at the Strelka Institute in Moscow.
A recording of Pietrusko's sound installation, Six Microphones, was released by famed sound art label, LINE imprint in the Autumn of 2019, and his most recent data documentary, In Plain Site, will be exhibited at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis from September 12, 2020 through April of 2021, as part of the show, “Designs for Different Futures.” In the spring of 2020, Pietrusko was awarded a Rome Prize in Landscape Architecture by the American Academy in Rome and the Garden Club of America.
Pietrusko was the 2019 Wilder Green Architecture Fellow at MacDowell. While in residence he wrote the essay, “A Speculative Cartography,” which will be included in the book, The New Normal, edited by Benjamin Bratton, on Sternberg Press. He also began two new sound-based works: the first, MSS, explores the sonification of remotely-sensed satellite data. The second, Everything was forever until it was no more, attempts to find emotional correlates between our current environmental crisis and the ambivalent experience of eastern bloc citizens during the collapse of the Soviet system.
Robert Gerard Pietrusko
Fellow Works Supported by MacDowell
A Speculative Cartography (Essay)
MSS (Mixed Media)
Studios
Adams
Robert Gerard Pietrusko worked in the Adams studio.
Given to the MacDowell Association by Margaret Adams of Chicago, the half-timbered, stuccoed Adams Studio was designed by MacDowell Fellow and architect F. Tolles Chamberlin ca. 1914. Chamberlin was primarily a painter, but also provided designs for the Lodge and an early renovation of the main hall. The studio’s structural integrity was restored during a thorough renovation in…