They all tell some version of the same story: how we shape and find meaning in the physical landscape around us, whether it’s through oil exploration, architecture, map-making or freeway building.
The center’s latest show, which runs through Sunday, is both more of the same and among its finest yet. Organized by Matthew Coolidge, who founded the land use center in 1994, “Centers of the USA” accomplishes, at first blush, no more and no less than its title suggests: It charts all the places in the United States, nine in all, that claim to occupy the center of the country.
There’s the geographical center (near Belle Fourche, S.D.); the population center (Plato, Mo.); and something called the “geodetic” center (a few miles outside Osborne, Kan.), pinpointed using a method that corrects for the curvature of the earth.
Now there’s even a Google center: the point you reach if you call up a map of the U.S. on the search engine and zoom straight in as far as you can go. Depending on your browser, that’ll take you to one of two other towns in Kansas, each of which is the hometown of a Google employee.
No comments yet.