Design Readiness for Landscape Architects

Drawing Exercises that Generate Ideas

Les Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317401803
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Demands on landscape architecture students' time are many and varied – when is there a chance to just sketch, and is it worth dedicating your time to the pursuit of drawing? This book shows how in short bursts you can build up your design skills using quick, relaxed sketches, which form the basis for full projects and studio work.

This book will provide you with your own image library – sources of inspiration, guidance, and short-cuts to future designs. A variety of paths leading to design discovery, based upon experimental sketching methods, are discussed, demonstrated, and then put into action with valuable exercises. These exercises focus your sketching, giving hints and tips on what to look for, how to capture the essence of the object or location, and how to become a natural in the art of speedy visual communication. Real-life examples of the author's built-works as a landscape architect show how professionals use these techniques in their own design creations.

Design Readiness for Landscape Architects presents enjoyable and thought-stirring essays and drawing-based exercises to help students grow more facile and agile in their service as architects of the land, whether using tablets, paints, or pens and pencils.

PREPARING FOR DESIGN DISCOVERY: STRETCHING BEFORE THE RUN

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Synopsis: This chapter and outlined exercises encourage the student to value drawing for its complete benefits – generating ideas applicable in future design work. Drawing for the purpose of discovering ideas does require time and effort expended in experimental drawing and diagramming. The process builds up one’s internal storehouse of design possibilities for future project work. The examples and exercises provided instruct how to practice design drawing, initially free of real-site or real-project constraints and variables.

Experimental drawing expressing a synthesis of natural and built forms.

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Primary learning outcomes: From knowledge acquired in this chapter, including practicing the exercises, students:

– Will understand and be conversant with a number of mental processes and theories related to learning, emphasizing the realm of inventive visual thinking.

– Will be able to generate for themselves sketchbook-based design experiments.

– Will be able to demonstrate increased agility when using drawing and diagramming to investigate design themes (such as morphology of forms, force-influenced patterns, and interactive geometries).

– Will assemble a personal form and space idea bank, populated with self-generated design possibilities, unrestrained by pre-judgment.

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Relevance to landscape architectural students and professionals: In order to generate and achieve inventive, timely, and effective design outcomes for clients and real-project work, designers cultivate and sustain agile visual-thinking capacities. Cultivating this unified set of skills (designer fitness) requires exercises and workouts, similar to athletics training.

TRACKING DESIGN DISCOVERY

Students and practitioners of landscape architectural design have access to oceans of genuine advice. Design education is flush with recommendations and teaching tools meant to help students perform more imaginatively – to be designers. Programs and manuals provide helpful suggestions on how to be more inventive and innovative when called to design. It is equally valuable and fundamental that design education provides instruction outlining the necessary preparations that fuel imagination, inventiveness, and innovation in designers. Runners stretch before the run.

The world of design education has inducted the term creative as the title of performance qualifying a design student’s success on the path to professional designer. A number of synonyms for creative actually describe the core energy driving designers and designs towards brilliance. Some of these synonyms are imaginative, resourceful, original, fertile, ingenious, inspired, inventive, and innovative. They each recognize that, in achieving good design, pursuit and performance are one. A vibrant path harvests productive capacity.

There is little convincing evidence that individuals described or observed as creative are born visionary. In the design disciplines, the common trait of so-called creative ones is that they eagerly develop a storehouse of ideas to draw upon, a cache of ideas bred by practicing, by run-throughs. They regularly practice and therefore expand their compilation of design-related thoughts and ideas – they rehearse the design process. By practicing design, by frequently undertaking design drills, they are developing and acquiring ingredients, ready to apply to their design work.

Imagination requires a bank of images to work from. Resourcefulness requires a substantial stockpile of resources from which to draw upon. Originality requires profound familiarity with beginnings and sources. Fertility stems from an array of inputs and nutrients already gathered and on hand. Ingenuity is cultivated by exposing oneself to (and emerging from) a series of challenges that build cleverness. Inspired outcomes require experiencing many notable, inspirational events. Inventiveness results from resolute patterns and habits of experimentation. And innovation requires gaining experience of methods that stimulate new thinking and new ideas.

Study of built forms and landscape forms composed of intersecting volumes.

This chapter will emphasize how to build the background and resources for new design ideas. It will prepare the groundwork essential to shape imagination, invention, and inspiration. It will provide a map to design discovery, plotting a personalized path to design innovation.

THE LEFT-BRAIN AND RIGHT-BRAIN THEORIES RELATED TO DRAWING

The left-brain and right-brain theories (L+R) have held substantial ground since emerging in the 1960s. These theories have been applied to explanations of how creativity operates and unfolds in the production of artistic actions. There is now a substantial body of work that endeavors to understand and guide drawing and design ideation through an L+R brain perspective (Edwards 2012).

Those applying the L+R brain theories to drawing and design hold that the right brain engages drawing activity more intuitively, with less literal results – representing and interpreting things more comprehensively, more meaningfully, and more expressively as whole assemblages of lines, surfaces, shades, and textures. It is held that the left brain interprets visual and conceptual elements logically, arriving at quick, methodical, and less imaginative conclusions – abstract, extra-simple, and symbolized.

The L+R brain theories are now under scrutiny. There remains general agreement that the left- and right-brain hemispheres address and process differing and somewhat distinct categories of thinking. But recent research has suggested that earlier theories of the L+R brain performance have oversimplified the separation of the left- and right-brain functions and outcomes. Analysts now observe complex interrelated and interwoven functions of the left- and right-brain sectors. There is considerable evidence that the two sectors cross over, combine, and interact in back-and-forth exchange processes – sometimes sharing and contributing simultaneously in both physiological and psychological realms.

EXPLICIT VERSUS IMPLICIT KNOWLEDGE

Current research and resulting theories surrounding creativity employ new terminology in the quest to explain innovative and inventive behavior and outcomes. Without refuting that the left- and right-brain sectors serve distinct and dominant functions, the emphasis is now on investigating the type of knowledge and thought processes employed – with less focus on the location in the brain where they originate and are processed.

Currently, neurological research concentrates on describing and explaining creativity from the perspective of two distinct types of knowledge – explicit knowledge and implicit knowledge.

Explicit knowledge is the grouping and display of useful information, such as in a woodworker’s manual on how to build a desk. It informs the woodworker, listing the materials needed and providing step-by-step procedures on processing and assembling the parts into a finished piece of furniture.

Implicit knowledge comprises previously processed and internalized banks of interrelated information based upon experiences, including successes, failures, and pReferences. It is a comprehensive and fully fledged thinking-to-action skill set. In the woodworking example, implicit knowledge is compiled and stored within the experienced woodworker over many years and many projects. It is the reservoir of implicit knowledge that steers the master to fashion and produce a desk autonomously. The end result is crafted with confidence, distinguished by its high quality.

But the key is that explicit knowledge was essential to the formation of the master woodworker’s implicit knowledge. Explicit knowledge incrementally packs together and becomes the capability of the master woodworker, eventually amassed to form implicit knowledge that drives the master’s work. Explicit knowledge builds the master and leads to mastery.

It is therefore important to engage actively in piece-by-piece preparation (explicit knowledge build-up) in order to assemble a complex of implicit knowledge that yields exceptional design results. Implicit knowledge is cultivated by practicing the act of design – through routine exercises. Calisthenic and gymnastic exercises produce competitive performance in athletes. Similarly, the practice of drawing produces visual and spatial fitness that feeds excellence in design. An active program of drawing, for the purpose of practice, is vital to generating fresh and well-balanced design ideas.

Experimental image portraying “living machine” sited at shoreline.

DESIGN EXPERIMENTS DIFFER FROM DESIGN EXPLORATIONS

The drawing exercises in each chapter of this book progress from experimental types (i.e. those not applied to real sites or real projects) to explorations (i.e. those directly applied and related to real project design work).

Science and mathematics use the expression experimentation to describe the testing of a question (a hypothesis). The testing proceeds with clear and reproducible methods. The results of experiments are charted and compared for consistency. Often these experiments dramatically simplify a real-world condition, and implement the experiment in laboratory or clinical confines.

In the realm of drawing and design, experimentation is similar, but with a greater emphasis on questioning than answering. Drawing experiments are not so controlled. They are productive when they bring about unanticipated results – results that stimulate more pondering, more questioning. Experimental drawings concentrate on the enjoyable process of seeking, not seriously driven to find “the answer.” Drawing experiments are successful when they generate curiosity, evoke more questions, and suggest alternative routes to a design idea. Drawing-based experiments operate freely. They are not confined within many parameters. They are not bound to formulaic procedures. Looking for design ideas through experimentation provides useful speculations that may lead to new possibilities – possibilities freed from preconceptions, even though their applicability is yet to be determined. These experiments endeavor to deliver fresh and unforeseen spatial ideas beyond the boundaries typically set by real projects.

Exploration in the sciences, math, medicine, and data analysis deals with finding answers typically within real and existing situations. For instance, exploration when applied to discovery within a broad and expansive existing collection of data is frequently termed data mining. This term establishes the primary distinction between experimentation and exploration. Exploration digs into real settings, endeavoring to pull out or extract concrete patterns, interpretations, answers – that is, solutions.

Drawing and design explorations address considerations that are specific to a project. Explorations employ drawings to discover and suggest potential design solutions fitting a particular site, program, client, and contextual parameters. An exploration, however, is not responsible to reveal detailed design solutions. Similar to design experiments, design explorations produce results without being presupposed. Explorations are set on a particular path of discovery. They are carried out keyed into tangible conditions that are to be addressed in a specific landscape design task. Explorations strive to generate design ideas, expanding the array of project-specific design alternatives. They expand a design process by uncovering novel and workable ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on the author
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Preparing for design discovery: stretching before the run
• 2 Forms responding to systems
• 3 Field sketching to translation: the algebra and geometry of designers
• 4 Inner precedents: design ideas drawn from vigilant observation
• 5 Discovering the artistries and crafts: building design language
• 6 Ideas feed the build
• 7 Conclusion
• Index