Renowned environmental artist Xavier Cortada encounters the Invisible Barn, a thought-provoking folly at Sagehen Creek Field Station. Image credit: Sagehen Creek Field Station Take a forest stroll at the NRS’s Sagehen Creek Field Station, and you will encounter an Invisible Barn. The structure’s edges fade into the open air, until…
Raising an Invisible Barn
…at you. Then realization dawns on you–you’re seeing a reflection of yourself surrounded by nature. This is the concept behind Invisible Barn, an environmental art project designed to provoke questions about the presence of people in nature. Developed by New York design firm stpmj, Invisible Barn was selected as a…
Why art at NRS reserves?
…people in nature, without telling them explicitly what to think or how to feel. Water strider. Image credit: Faerthen Felix Invisible Barn is a departure from the idea of imposing preconceived, top-down form on a community narrative. It’s more abstract. Invisible Barn builds on the techniques of the Aldo Leopold…
Ranch transformed into premier reserve
…a four-mile-long dirt road, and the only habitable building on the 3,280-acre spread was an honest-to-goodness barn with a small office-cum-residence in one corner. With no other housing options, the reserve’s first director, Mike Hamilton, lived in that barn during the reserve’s earliest years. During that time, just a few…
Field station planned for UC Merced’s Vernal Pools and Grassland Reserve
…feel in awe of nature.” The Virginia Smith Trust barn before its collapse in April. Image credit: Veronica Adrover The Virginia Smith Trust barn Before reaching the vernal pools, Mo slows the Gator by the remains of the Virginia Smith Trust barn. Constructed in 1923, the barn gave way to…
Sedgwick ranch house revival
…already one of her passions; saving this one, part of her alma mater, made perfect sense. It wasn’t long before she offered to finance its restoration. The barn project was completed in 2009 and heralded with a barn dance that has since gone annual — the fifth iteration was held…
2020 wildfires burn six UC Natural Reserves; seventh threatened
…the internal roads.” Give to help McLaughlin Natural Reserve recover from fire >> Fire trucks parked at the Cedar Barn to protect the facilities at Blue Oak Ranch Reserve. Image: Mike Hamilton Blue Oak Ranch Reserve Lightning caught the chaparral and oaks atop Mount Hamilton to start the SCU Lightning…
Timeworn cattle ranch remade into NRS reserve
Emblematic of Sedgwick’s original ranch buildings, the reserve’s historic barn blends nicely with the maintenance shed, a renovated structure made possible by Prop. 84. Image: UC Santa Barbara When sculptor and philanthropist Duke Sedgwick bequeathed his family’s sprawling Santa Ynez Valley ranch to the University of California, he wrote that…