Species of Space (SOS) is the landscape art practice of Eric Ellingsen. SOS is Ellingsen's art company, the company through which he sometimes claims and signs solo-authored artwork. Like a rain garden, SOS caught the watershed of all of his creative activity, collaborations, and public research for over two decades, some of which SOS sill channels into the catch basin called “art”.
Ellingsen's research is ethnographic; walking-shoes on the ground. He designs and teaches through what he calls walkshops, walkie-talkies, and playshops. Like Lucius Berckhardt and a few other scientific- walkers, his research takes an eco-semiotic aesthetic approach to landscape ecology and social issues. One of his core claims is that landscape is language. His ongoing action-based research practice conflates three-types of our human feet. (1) Body feet; biometrics. (2) Architecture feet; rulers & measure. (3) Poetic feet; scansion & speaking. His mission is to develop a dynamic understanding of urban issues past, present, and future, and then alter them to whatever extent that he can in a healthy-Earth direction.
Ellingsen has taught large undergraduate lecture classes on the themes of Modernism and the visualization of Ecologies with 90-students or more, like at the Illinois Institute of Technology (2006-2009; 2016-2017) College of Architecture. Most of his undergraduate and graduate teaching has been in cohorts or classes ranging between 6-20 students per class. For the past 8-years, he served as the primary advisor for undergraduate students across Washington University in St. Louis that are interested in minoring in Landscape Architecture. One of the reasons that he was hired by Washington University in St Louis was to spearhead a new graduate dual-degree program between Landscape Architecture & Art. Altogether, he has taught 750 students across six-disciplinary appointments: architecture, landscape architecture, art (sculpture), industrial design, urban design, and historic preservation.
Ellingsen's research is ethnographic; walking-shoes on the ground. He designs and teaches through what he calls walkshops, walkie-talkies, and playshops. Like Lucius Berckhardt and a few other scientific- walkers, his research takes an eco-semiotic aesthetic approach to landscape ecology and social issues. One of his core claims is that landscape is language. His ongoing action-based research practice conflates three-types of our human feet. (1) Body feet; biometrics. (2) Architecture feet; rulers & measure. (3) Poetic feet; scansion & speaking. His mission is to develop a dynamic understanding of urban issues past, present, and future, and then alter them to whatever extent that he can in a healthy-Earth direction.
Ellingsen has taught large undergraduate lecture classes on the themes of Modernism and the visualization of Ecologies with 90-students or more, like at the Illinois Institute of Technology (2006-2009; 2016-2017) College of Architecture. Most of his undergraduate and graduate teaching has been in cohorts or classes ranging between 6-20 students per class. For the past 8-years, he served as the primary advisor for undergraduate students across Washington University in St. Louis that are interested in minoring in Landscape Architecture. One of the reasons that he was hired by Washington University in St Louis was to spearhead a new graduate dual-degree program between Landscape Architecture & Art. Altogether, he has taught 750 students across six-disciplinary appointments: architecture, landscape architecture, art (sculpture), industrial design, urban design, and historic preservation.
