The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston has published “Working Water,” the research and speculative landscape work produced by Michael Ezban MLA ’13 while he was in residence at the museum as the 2014 Maeder-York Family Fellow in Landscape Studies. “Working Water” brings the fish farm to the perennial discourse on designed productive landscapes in the discipline of landscape architecture. The work explores contemporary and historical models of aquaculture landscapes where recreation, conservation, waste management and cultivation are enmeshed in the public realm. Working Water concludes with the speculative design of Quabbin Fishery, a 240-acre aquaponic and angling landscape in central Massachusetts. Quabbin Fishery anchors a proposed regional network of ecological fishery landscapes that expand the utility of some of the state’s greatest assets: its freshwater reservoirs.

January 2015