Terrain Vague is a French term used by Spanish architect and critic Ignasi de Solà-Morales to describe ambiguous, unresolved, and marginalized spaces in the urban landscape. Terrain vague refers to sites that are often ignored in the mainstream discourse on architecture and design, such as industrial wastelands and monotonous suburban developments.

Solà-Morales notes that photographers and architects address terrain vague in differing ways. The photographer sees these spaces as places that are imbued with a storied past. Architects, however, approach these spaces as problems to be solved through design. Solà-Morales asks:

What is to be done with these enormous voids, with their imprecise limits and vague definition? Art’s reaction . . . is to preserve these alternative, strange spaces. . . . Architecture’s destiny [by contrast] has always been colonization, the imposing of limits, order, and form, the introduction into strange space of the elements of identity necessary to make it recognizable, identical, universal.

In this exhibition, nine photographers and one filmmaker invite us to contemplate the subtle qualities of terrain vague in America. Martha Rosler, Catherine Opie, and Philip-Lorca di Corcia critically ponder the transitional spaces of transportation, such as airports, freeways, subways, and even sidewalks. The starkly lit compositions of Todd Hido and David Deutsch re-present the domestic realm in studies of solitude and surveillance. Similarly, the documentary images of Andy Anderson and Bill Owens reveal the ironies of suburban life. Edward Burtynsky transforms active and abandoned industrial sites into sublime renditions of nature, while images of industrial parks and corporate plazas by Lewis Baltz and Doug Muir bid us to reconsider the commercially developed spaces in our own urban environment.

Terrain Vague challenges us to rethink our reactions to these often forgotten, interstitial spaces rather than to regard them as areas to be reordered, transformed, and homogenized. The viewer is asked to consider the ways in which the urban fabric might be developed without unraveling its ties to history and memory.

Terrain Vague: Photography, Architecture, and the Post-Industrial Landscape was organized by Ruth Dusseault and Chris Jarrett for the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center.