22nd
invisible landscape?
Recent discussion in landscape architecture centers on the development of design strategies that access, reveal, and improve the underlying processes that shape landscape. These include biophysical processes (i.e. ecological and hydrological) and cultural agents and artifacts (i.e. land-use practices, building patterns, and economic development). The means by which we describe the world impacts what and how we design and create. In many ways, this is analogous to descriptive language and literature. A major concern in the field is that the traditional graphics of landscape design (drawings and models) lend themselves well to designing pictorially beautiful landscapes, but are less effective at helping a designer depict change over time, show and describe natural processes, or study social and ecological relationships. Given the importance of invisible factors and processes on the landscape, I am motivated to examine new ways to access and disclose the underlying agents that give rise to the visual landscape. Landscape architects, like composers and choreographers, are distant authors of our work. In order to design, we must represent landscape features and processes in the form of images, models, pictures or drawings that we can manipulate in the studio, but are ultimately constructed in the field. We must represent our ideas so that others can understand this vision. The primary question motivating my work is: How can landscape architects operationally represent dynamic and unseen biophysical and cultural constraints so that we may incorporate them into a design for the future? Based on the premise that there is an imperfect relationship between reality and image, my research proposes that certain modes of representation may help to narrow the gap between the actual landscape and its visual depiction. Representation is an historic challenge for landscape architecture going back to the field’s earliest days. My work aligns with this tradition, but incorporates contemporary theory about media and representation.
