Chris Taylor is an architect, educator, and director of Land Arts of the American West at Texas Tech University. He studied architecture at the University of Florida and received his Master of Architecture from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard. In 1998 he was awarded the Steedman Traveling Fellowship by Washington University and spent a year in Venice Italy mapping the spatial character of the city’s existence between water and sky. Taylor teaches in the College of Architecture at Texas Tech, he has also taught within the interdisciplinary design program in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin and in architecture programs at the Universities of Arizona, North Dakota State, and Florida. He explores the interstitial forces creating landscape through his practice, the Architecture Workers Combine, which has built work in New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and Pennsylvania. Through his investment in the mechanics of construction and collaboration he has translated renga, an ancient form of Japanese communal poetry, into an operative model for building that pivots on excellence without requiring consensus.

Land Arts of the American West is a semester long interdisciplinary field program expanding the definition of land art through direct experience with the full range of human interventions in the landscape, from the inscriptions of pictographs and petrogylphs to the construction of roads, dwellings, and monuments, as well as traces of those actions. Land Arts investigates the intersection of geomorphology and human construction beginning with the land and extending through the complex social and ecological processes that produce contemporary landscapes. Land art includes gestures both small and grand, directing our attention from potsherd, cigarette butt, and mark in the sand to human settlements, monumental artworks, and military/industrial projects such as hydroelectric dams and decommissioned airfields. Each year Land Arts travels more than 8,000 miles to live and work for over fifty days in the landscape while visiting sites such as Chaco Canyon and Roden Crater, the Grand Canyon and Double Negative, the Wendover Complex of the Center for Land Use Interpretation and Spiral Jetty, Marfa and Cabinetlandia, the Very Large Array and The Lightning Field. Land Arts was founded in 2000 at the University of New Mexico by Bill Gilbert with the assistance of John Wenger. From 2001 to 2007 the program was developed collaboratively between Bill Gilbert and Chris Taylor, then at the University of Texas at Austin. Now Gilbert and Taylor operate the program autonomously at the University of New Mexico and Texas Tech University. In April 2009 the University of Texas Press published Land Arts of the American West. Authored by Taylor and Gilbert the book documents the creation and development of the program.

In 2007 Taylor led a group of students and professionals on a Land Arts expedition in Chile called Atacama Lab: 07. The fieldwork and supporting conference are documented in Incubo Atacama Lab (Dec 2008) published by the Santiago-based curatorial exchange organization Incubo.