Innovations in Landscape Architecture

Jonathon Anderson, Daniel Ortega, Jonathon R. Anderson, Daniel H. Ortega

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317506676
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architettura
• Subtopic: Pianificazione urbana e paesaggistica

This inspiring and thought-provoking book explores how recent innovations in landscape architecture have uniquely positioned the practice to address complex issues and technologies that affect our built environment. The changing and expanding nature of "landscape" make it more important than ever for landscape architects to seek innovation as a critical component in the forward development of a contemporary profession that merges expansive ideas and applications.

The editors bring together leading contributors who are experts in new and pioneering approaches and technologies within the fields of academic and professional landscape architecture. The chapters explore digital technology, design processes and theoretical queries that shape the contemporary practice of landscape architecture. Topics covered include:

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• Digital design

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• Fabrication and prototyping

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• Emerging technology

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• Visualization of data

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• System theory

Concluding the book are case studies looking at the work of two landscape firms (PEG and MYKD) and two academic departments (Illinois Institute of Technology and the Rhode Island School of Design), which together show the novel and exciting directions that landscape is already going in.

Part I Innovative tools

1 L A N D script _ data S C A P E ‘Digital' agency within manufactured territories

Jose Alfredo Ramirez and Clara Olóriz Sanjuán

DOI: 10.4324/9781315716336-1

Digital technologies influence the way we think, intervene and produce landscapes. Through the notions of landscript and datascape, this chapter reflects on the role of the designer and the new operative frameworks provided by simulation, geographic information and scripting software. It questions the reductive scientific approaches suggested by the objective and methodological procedures of digital technologies to then propose alternatives through two project theses developed at the AA Landscape Urbanism Programme which, through the meaning of techne, suggest a different form of agency and production to intervene within given landscapes and territories, acknowledging and stressing their manufactured and machinic nature.

New technologies constantly change and re-shape the way we think, design, and produce our environments and territories. Our impulse to control the surroundings in which we are immersed and live has triggered many of the innovations in technologies and methods that are now widely available to designers today. The invention of geometry, for instance, was triggered by the necessity to provide certainty to the distribution, property, and taxation of productive land around the Nile that shifted with every annual flooding – a fact on which the fertility of the land and thus, their living also depended on (Gardner 2009). More recently, the development of contemporary cartography, concomitant of the emergence of innovative surveying tools, provides a reliable technical tool for states and governments to ensure the control and delimitation of land, resources, and management of territories within and beyond their frontiers.

Along these lines, digital cartographic tools provide precise and accurate readings of the world based on their capacity to seamlessly handle and assemble vast amounts of information from multiple fields in the generation of territorial datascapes. Methodologies based on these innovative tools imply abstract systems of organization that provide frameworks to develop and script concrete interventions and management schemes into given territories. However, the processing capabilities of digital technologies have stressed the accuracy and objectiveness of information. The apparent objectiveness, efficiency, and pragmatism of these methodological approaches have detached these technologies from their purpose (a tool to project the future rather than analyze the present) while the procedural rigor has accentuated the scientific claims of design in the validation of management decisions. On this basis, we argue that this operative framework blurs and questions the role of the designer, and its capacity to engage territories and the dynamics that shape them. In these conditions, digital tools can exacerbate the designer’s detachment from contemporary conditions (as a mere observer) while diminishing its direct participation and implication from reality.

This chapter attempts to put forward alternative and novel ways to handle the potential of digital tools, both from the point of view of analysis and intervention, addressing the question of the designer’s agency within the scope of what we define as landscape and territorial projects. In order to do that, it proposes the re-engagement of designers in the idea of land-script and data-scapes, as a way forward to acknowledge the power of digital tools in the hands of the creative and critical stance of the designer. Both land-script and data-scapes share common etymological roots with the landscape. From a broader understanding of the latter, as a social and cultural construct, we intend to re-articulate our relation to the former terms.

Landscript

Digital scripting in the last decades has opened up possibilities for designers to generate an array of infinite variations from one original set of instructions. To feed these instructions, contemporary data mining is used in the form of input parameters to generate multiple configurations, reducing considerably the time and effort to produce each of them. Through a set of instructions fed by the set of supplied measurements, the scripting produces iterations adaptable to every parametric variation.

In Carpo’s view, these digital tools are rapidly outdating the procedures we have been conventionally using to design and produce architecture. The Albertian paradigm, as defined by Carpo, led architecture to pursue ‘identicality’ (Carpo 2011, 35–48) – between the set of instructions reflected in the architectural drawings and the constructed product – as the crucial feature that defined its practice in the last centuries. The architectural drawing, and associated conventions, is the tool whereby the architect can design and control architecture without being on the construction site – ‘allographic practice.’ This design process allows the designer to claim full authorship over the single end product: the building. However, digital tools are radically affecting this production mode: from a set of instructions they are capable of producing not only one single end product – object – but an indefinite number of similar variations, which are not identical copies – algorithm. There are a number of potential advantages in this paradigm shift such as the rise of non-standard production systems and the emergence of new material properties. However, Carpo warns us that ‘for the same reasons the emerging non-standard environment is bound to be meaningless’ (Carpo 2011, 106) as the decision making process is more frequently entrusted to the parameters of the algorithm and less to the critical discernment of the designer(s).

An interesting reference between the relationship of a technology, such as the script, and landscape can be found in David Leatherbarrow’s proposition to use Landscript or Landgraph as a substitute for the word landscape. In his essay ‘Levelling the land’ (Letherbarrow 1999, 172–175) he refers to the Greek myth by Pherecides of Phyros whereby Zeus threw a matrimonial veil over the head of the goddess of the underworld on which he wove the lines and divisions of the earth, the ocean, and the houses of the ocean. Leatherbarrow describes this veil as a map or mat, an artifact constructed through artistic work. In this sense, landscript is understood as a veil, generated and mediated through the intention and agency of a designer – Zeus – that makes the previously ‘uncharted and unnavigable’ ground ‘livable.’ It represents a form of control over the Earth that makes it habitable. This understanding of a landscript as a set of instructions for a constructed artifice with embedded intention is highly relevant with regards to the advancement of new technologies and the fact that almost the entirety of Earth’s surface has been modified, intervened, or manufactured by humans, as the current discussions to assign the term Anthropocene (Sample 2014) to our age suggests.¹

These authors pose several questions related to the designer’s agency.² On the one hand, the control of the Greek fabric makes us aware of the agency of digital tools in governing landscape and territory as well as the validation of decisions. On the other hand, the landscript embodies the idea of landscape as the modelling and control of given conditions and dynamics that in turn affect the way they are ‘draped.’ The third interrogation that is suggested in Carpo’s paradigm shift is from the multiple variations offered by the script: What are the criteria for selection? Is it parametric efficiency or optimization? How do those variations acquire meaning?

Datascapes

Today’s gathering and monitoring of data, such as market data mining and more specifically related to Geographic Information Systems (GIS), has radically transformed the digital capacity of producing knowledge about landscapes, cities, the environment and its inhabitants based on the ability to cross-relate multiple and complex sets of data. Picon states that the digital permeation in the landscape disciplines ‘lies in the capacity to accumulate and intersect all kinds of data’ making it ‘more and more difficult to distinguish between landscape and Datascape’ (Picon 2013, 126). Furthermore, the digital capacity to compute data enables a dynamic understanding of processes, their abstraction through time, and thus, the simulation or prediction of behavioural patterns in future scenarios.

The availability and accuracy of data enables the production of scientific readings that are based on objective facts, mathematically related through algorithms and formulas that unveil legible patterns and potential developments in the territory. Digital tools stress the need for accuracy and the translation of conditions into quantifiable factors, radically transforming our approaches towards map-making and landscape representation. GIS, according to Corner – as well as simulation software and scripting methods – are presented to us as ‘devices of inventory, quantitative analysis and legitimization of future plans’ (Corner 1999, 221). This status of digital mapping, or ‘accelerated technological change’ in J.B. Harley’s words strengthens ‘its positivist assumptions’ (quoted in Corner 1999, 221) which can be read as a continuation of a trend initiated in the reasoning behind scientific urban maps of the Enlightenment.

Dennis Cosgrove describes eighteenth-century graphic design as undecorated simplicity that ‘articulates goals of cartographic accuracy and objectivity by erasing evidence of human intervention between survey instrument and printed image’ (Cosgrove 2006, 154). These maps built the grounds for ‘the emerging science of urban statistics, by which expanding state capitals, and new industrial cities were to be regulated’ (Cosgrove 2006, 154).³ Cosgrove’s portrayal of the Enlightenment approach towards map-making and Corner’s description of contemporary digital tools pose several questions for us in the fabrication of datascapes: they stress the claims for objectivity or ‘the erasing of the human hand’ but, at the same time, they warn us about the agency of mappings in managing cities (Picon 2013, 126) and the legitimization of plans. Thus, within the supposedly analytic and selective process of gathering and relating data for the uncovering of territorial patterns and fabrication of datascapes: what is our role as designers? Is it merely collection of facts or does it construct a synthetic and subjective image of a city or territory? Does it acquire a regulatory or enacting role that validates management decisions?

These two sets of questions related to landscript and datascapes are going to be addressed through two design theses from the Landscape Urbanism programme from the Architectural Association (AALU) where we put forward critical cartographies – using GIS and simulation software – to not only identify overarching questions and alternative readings of various sites across Europe, but also to construct an argument that outlines the designer’s approach and understanding of these particular territories. Throughout the following two examples, we will outline AALU’s principles as part of an approach towards the territory that understands digital technology as an operative framework that re-claims the notions of agency and specificity through the recovery of the notion of ‘techne’. This notion is of special relevance for us to propose alternatives to the methodological and reductive understanding of digital tools and the critical questioning of their application in specific contexts. Thus, we propose a constant feedback process between strategies based on general principles and context-related decisions through its actualization or acquisition of meaning within specific territories in time.

Coastal Futures

To further explain one particular approach towards the role of the designer in the use of digital tools, we will use a project called Coastal Futures by Valeria Garcia and Yunya Tang. In their design thesis, Valeria and Yunya examine contemporary flooding scenarios and the possibility to use coastal erosion, caused by extreme storms and surge conditions, to develop tidal creeks. Flooding scenarios in turn will gradually build the tectonic grounds to propose alternative productive spatial territories from where land formations can be then re-articulated.

The proposal makes use of the so-called catastrophic events, su...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction: The only thing we have to fear …
• Part I Innovative tools
• Part II Innovative processes
• Part III Innovative profiles
• Index