Responsive Landscapes

Strategies for Responsive Technologies in Landscape Architecture

Bradley E Cantrell, Justine Holzman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317634058
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

The sensing, processing, and visualizing that are currently in development within the environment boldly change the ways design and maintenance of landscapes are perceived and conceptualised. This is the first book to rationalize interactive architecture and responsive technologies through the lens of contemporary landscape architectural theory.

Responsive Landscapes frames a comprehensive view of design projects using responsive technologies and their relationship to landscape and environmental space. Divided into six insightful sections, the book frames the projects through the terms; elucidate, compress, displace, connect, ambient, and modify to present and construct a pragmatic framework in which to approach the integration of responsive technologies into landscape architecture.

Complete with international case studies, the book explores the various approaches taken to utilise responsive technologies in current professional practice. This will serve as a reference for professionals, and academics looking to push the boundaries of landscape projects and seek inspiration for their design proposals.

01
Introduction

Figure 01.01 Ecolibrium, Kim Nguyen, Devin Boutte, Martin Moser, Joshua Brooks, Responsive Systems Studio, 2011

The Paradigm Shift

The last two decades have seen a range of experiments using respon sive technologies focused on the interaction between environmental phenomena and architectural space. These experiments go beyond site or architectural controls that rely on efficiency and automation instead they are attempts to expand the application of responsive technologies. Novel and explorative work within this realm has emerged as installations or unique architectural features, often requiring collaborations across disciplinary boundaries and the hacking of accessible technologies. This text highlights a collection of projects experimenting with the application of responsive tech nologies and pulls forth methods specifically related to the indeter minacy and dynamics in contemporary landscape architecture. The application of responsive technologies in architecture has become technically advanced, but is “… in fact responding to the question posed in the 1960s by Cedric Price: What if a building or space could be constantly generated and regenerated?”¹ For landscape architects the act of response and regeneration is the basis of our profession and inherent to landscape as a medium. Therefore it is necessary to understand a framework for responsive technologies that speaks to the scale of the territory and acknowledges the interconnections of the many.

The advancement and availability of responsive technologies have increased accessibility to designers, prompting the development of new design methodologies that move beyond conventional methods of representation and implementation. The introduction of accessible software sets the stage for design culture to appropriate and advance software and hardware tools.² New methods focus on the expression or design of processes, logics, and protocols requiring design interventions to evolve throughout a project’s lifespan. Evidenced by Usman Haque and Adam Somlai-Fischer’s open-source research report, “Low Tech Sensors and Actuators for Artists and Architects,”³ detailing the hacking and re-purposing of low-cost and widely available technologies embedded in toys and standard devices as a method for artists, architects, and designers to quickly and effectively prototype responsive and interactive urban installations that would otherwise require client support. In a similar manner “… during the 1980s GUI-based software quickly put the computer in the center of culture,”⁴ the advent of visual programming is putting coding and scripting directly in the hands of designers. The coupling of Arduino IDE boards and kit-of-parts beginner robotic kits with software plugins to easily program unique methods of response have further hastened the pace of artists and designers prototyping innovative interactive solutions to urban scale problems.

Landscape architecture has seen a paradigm shift in the last two decades, requiring designers to respond to the dynamic and temporal qualities of landscape. This response examines the long-held view that landscape embraces an ephemeral medium constructed and main tained through generations. Landscape—a dynamic and temporal medium—is expressed through careful manipulation of vegetated, hydrological, and stratigraphic systems. Combining this shift with the increased accessibility of responsive technologies presents a new approach for challenging static design solutions. The ability to sense and respond to environmental phenomena invites new ways to understand, interpret, experience, and interact with the landscape.

This shift can be traced to several parallel events inherent to the discipline of Landscape Architecture and seeded by new paradigms in scientific thought particularly within ecology. A generational trend has emerged within landscape architecture that promotes a form of “distanced authorship,”⁵ emphasizing natural processes such as succession, accretion, or passive remediation as agents for landscape design. In the essay, “Strategies of Indeterminacy in Recent Landscape Practice,” Charles Waldheim uses the term “distanced authorship” to describe how the “privileging of landscape strategy and ecological process distances authorial control over urban form, while allowing for specificity and responsiveness to market conditions as well as the moral high-ground and rhetorical clarity of environmental determinism.”⁶ Autonomy within these systems has the potential to create scaffolds for designed landscapes, urbanism, or territorialization. This approach privileges the actions of biology and geology over manufactured static conditions and instead seeds these dynamic processes through an overarching ecological regime to shape designed conditions over time.

In the introduction to Case: Downsview Park Toronto, Julia Czerniak synthesizes this shift, traced from the international design competition for Parc de la Villette (1982/1983), towards “process” and “ecological frameworks,” … reshaping landscape perceptions to value “processes of becoming,” “frameworks over form,” and performance.⁷

Bernard Tschumi’s team proposal frames processes around a few key species and relies on processes of succession to build complexity over time, creating a known starting point and a maintenance regime that embraces flux. James Corner and Stan Allen’s team proposal, titled “Emergent Ecologies,” engages the concept of emergence as the combination of intentional and unintentional futures shaped by ecology and human intervention as an “engineered matrix” performing as a “living groundwork for new forms and combinations of life to emerge.”⁸ Corner and Allen boldly state, “we do not determine or predict outcomes; we simply guide or steer flows of matter and information.”⁹

Continuing along this trajectory, in 2002 Field Operation’s proposal for Fresh Kills in Staten Island highlighted phasing and indeterminacy as central agents in design. Fresh Kills is a brownfield landscape of significant scale requiring novel methods for performative uses of vegetation with minimal maintenance regimes. This approach bridges earlier projects redefining the discipline of Landscape Architecture that focused on post-industrial remediation, to expand the scope, scale, and potential for remediation and evolving landscapes. Field Operations uses a similar method of seeding vegetation within bands tied to the elevations of the landforms (landfills).

What emerges from the late 1990s in landscape architecture is over two decades of exploration that has focused on complexity, indeterminacy, and dynamic systems. This body of research is marked by texts such as The Landscape Urbanism Reader¹⁰ edited by Charles Waldheim (2006); Ecological Urbanism¹¹ edited by Mohsen Mostafavi and Gareth Doherty (2010), key categories of which are “sense,” “curate,” “interact,” and “measure”; and most recently Projective Ecologies¹² edited by Nina-Marie Lister and Chris Reed (2013), which draws together a reader of seminal essays contributing to this discourse around concepts of “dynamics,” “succession,” “emergence,” and “adaptability.” This direction for the discipline continues to evolve the concept of “distanced authorship”¹³ through a series of practices that have fought to realize built works. Landscape Architecture is a discipline of making. Practitioners and academics have sought to employ a multitude of techniques to understand how landscapes evolve and interrelate. On one hand, the profession has engaged and developed workflow methodologies with state-of-the-art tools in computation to simulate, analyze, and spatialize huge datasets to understand complex ecological relationships. On the other, landscape architects have pushed this agenda through the traditional tools of drawing, modeling, and diagramming to describe these complex systems, essentially outlining the projective tools they need. At this moment, there are trajectories for new computational methods beginning to find traction tied to a lineage of representational methods interrogating time through drawing and photo graphic methods such as the static series, image sequence, and photographic recording methods. This mode of seeing and transforming through an increased faculty with computational tools brings forth a new project for landscape that is firmly seated in an evolving ecological framework—a framework which, through distanced authorship, intends to address landscape of larger scales with more complex ecological problems tied to settlement and industry.

An ecological framework for landscape architecture is one that is based on strategy, an approach to landscape inextricably tied to habitat, species, and culture. Kate Orff describes that her “intuitive leap towards landscape begins with imagining the life it carries: mammals, molluscs, protoplasm” when describing her re-reading of Rachel Carson’s 1937 book, Undersea, for Harvard Design Magazine.¹⁴ This attachment to ecology through the species and individuals is a relationship that landscape architects and other environmentally based disciplines state as inspiration. It is also a powerful mechanism that pulls the public into ecologically based projects. This sentiment, coupled with advances in ecological sciences and a mandate for landscape architectural practice to adopt a strategic mandate, is the framework landscape architects rely upon.¹⁵ This evolving framework is perfectly suited as a basis for utilizing responsive technologies and computation in ecological systems.

The ability to implement new computational methodologies hinge around emerging technologies for sensing and responding to realtime conditions. Responsive technologies counter disturbances through self-regulating systems, apparent when, “the linear system disturbs the relation the self-regulating system was set up to maintain with its environment.”¹⁶ Responsive technologies play a pivotal role in our evolving relationship between constructed and evolved systems. Current models of machine/human interaction are quickly evolving to encompass more complex methods of simulated intelligence and nuanced response. Several technologies that change the landscape of responsive technologies are converging, including autonomous robotics, distributed intelligence, biotic/abiotic interfaces, and ubiquitous sensing networks. As early as the 1980s, Xerox PARC coined the term “ubiquitous computing,” which imagined the evolution of the human computer interface to “[take] into account the natural and human environment and [allow] the computer to vanish into the background.”¹⁷ With this focus away from HCI as personal device and integration into the environment, these technologies

Figure 01.02 Synthetic territories diagram, Bradley Cantrell, 2011

fundamentally alter our perception of constructed systems and their nuanced relationships with ecological processes.

These technologies have been recognized within architecture for their potential to create flexible and adaptable (though not adaptive in the ways ecological systems have the capacity to evolve) spatial or social conditions. “While, arguably, architecture has always been responsive, encouraging interaction between a space and the people that use it, new technological developments are putting pressure on architecture to become more adaptable and intelligent.”¹⁸ The extent to which responsive technologies address the goals of contemporary landscape architectural theory remains an emerging field. Responsive Landscapes conceptualizes the connection between environmental phenomena and responsive technologies as a continuum in which landscape places a vital role. The sensing, processing, and visualizing we are currently developing within the environment boldly changes the ways we perceive and conceptualize the design and maintenance of landscape or environment. Both Interactive Architecture¹⁹ by Michael Fox and Miles Kemp (2009), and Responsive Environments²⁰ by Lucy Bullivant (2006) have set precedents for the integration of responsive technologies in the field of architecture. Interactive Architecture highlights malleable systems and transformable morphologies, whereas Responsive Environments beg...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• List of figures
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• 1. INTRODUCTION
• 2. RESPONSIVE TECHNOLOGIES
• 3. EXPANDING THE FEEDBACK LOOP
• 4. ELUCIDATE
• 5. COMPRESS
• 6. DISPLACE
• 7. CONNECT
• 8. AMBIENT
• 9. MODIFY
• Bibliography
• Index