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Time Drawing as a Key Practice for Beginners in Landscape Architecture
Full text linkThe subject matter of the Landscape Expression course for students starting the master’s degree in landscape architecture at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia in Barcelona is the dynamic representation of landscape. Its objective is to introduce new students to changing and temporal aspects of the problem of its graphic representation.
In our case, few of the students have previous landscape architecture training. Most of them come from disciplines dealing with spatial development or space, such as architecture or engineering. Others come from fields of knowledge related to biology or the environment and are not used to design and the need to graphically communicate that it implies. The course confronts students with the contradiction between landscape – diverse and dynamic – and our flat and static representations
Deep Adaptive Reuse: A response to the 21st-century urban challenges
Full text linkThe world is undergoing dramatic change in its social and physical environments, resulting in cultural confrontation and conflict. Rapid urban growth, displacement, and gentrification increase urban pressure while jeopardising social cohesion, multicultural values, and local economies. In addition, environmental factors associated with climate change challenge how our cities respond and adapt, prompting the need for urban centre regeneration to confront the urban century challenges (Sassen, 2011). However, adaptation to these changes is also a source of conflict, as urban policies lack citizen engagement in the redefinition of public space, resulting in more disagreement and inefficient use of resources.
One way to respond to this ongoing crisis is adaptive reuse, repurposing an underused system for a new use. This process can enhance positive environmental impacts, encourage social and participatory processes, and promote economic dynamism through culture. However, the success of such an intervention will depend on the underlying approach.
The paper aims to explore how Jem Bendell’s ambitious four-pronged Deep Adaptation strategy (Bendell, 2018) combined with the cultural resilience approach can result in adaptive reuse processes that act as development catalysers and peace-building mechanisms
Captured Moments of Landscape Metamorphosis
Full text linkLandscape architecture students at the University of Ljubljana were encouraged to prepare temporal series of landscape and plant drawings to sharpen their sensitivity to changes in the perception of a land motive and vegetation morphology. Students chose a particular motive, defined the frame of the drawing, and identified characteristic plants on site. The motives were sketched several times during the year to portray seasonal changes. Specific environmental conditions (fog, rain, sunny day) were captured in drawings, and in the case of plants, drawings revealed the transitions of selected physiological events (budding, flowering, fruiting). These transformations were discussed in connection with landscape perception and as a tool in the design process
Cross-scale drawings of hidden landscape dynamics
Full text linkThe question of how to show processes that are by definition time-based has been one of the more intriguing ones in the field of landscape representation. With ever-greater importance being given to values of space that can be measured, we ask if new approaches to the drawing of space are needed to unveil these measured, sometimes hidden landscapes. With this in mind, students in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Ljubljana undertaking the Visual Communication course were tasked with developing new techniques of data visualization focusing on (1) the spatial dynamics of landscapes and (2) on the multiscalarity of the representations.
The paper comprises a general description and discussion of the topic, accompanied by seven sets of drawings where the two above-mentioned aspects are briefly discussed in the drawings’ captions. The drawings presented here push and question the boundaries of drawing conventions and consequently elicit uncertainty and encourage further enquiry. Exploring new drawing approaches is an important part of revealing contemporary landscapes
The significance of time in the design of a public landscape: Exploring accepted, experimental and relational dimensions of drawing time
Full text linkThis paper revisits a built project to reveal a hidden and experimental ambition for a public space through drawing in time.
Behind the project’s initial inception lay the designer’s motivation to challenge, open and expand the consideration of time in the way in which public landscapes are invented, configured and received. As such, the project sought to attend both to the way in which time manifests as a design consideration through drawing and to the way in which time could be conceptually and experientially sustained in the afterlife of the completed work.
In the inevitable ebbs and flows of productivity and decision taking that ran through the project, the designer came to realize that the ambitions outlined above stretched beyond their client’s comprehension of what the project could and should be. Instead, an aspiration to design “in time” became subservient to the client and stakeholders’ focus on the material manifestation of the work as a visual object and to the project’s public reception when it was deemed “complete”. For the designer this meant that opportunities to expand design thinking into practices tied to the continuing and relational opportunities of the space remained disappointingly determinate and closed.
By revisiting the existing representations and by making new drawings that were more explorative and unburdened by the conditions of project delivery, new liberty was found, revealing a unique bond between drawing in time and the relational opportunities of the work
Deep Adaptation - The Spatial Dimension
Full text linkThe future, which we thought we had maybe another decade to prepare for, is now suddenly here. In all likelihood, we can expect further crises such as the Covid-19 pandemic or of similar severity, especially in the context of climate change. They will render the 21st century radically different from the 20th: conventions, techniques, and social practices we are familiar with will disappear. Our responsibilities and roles as architects and urban planners will also change fundamentally in this process. We will work in increasingly volatile and vulnerable contexts and constellations.
Until now, many actors in politics, but also in academia and research, have played down or denied the vulnerability of our urban structures to the risks that are the direct effects of our current way of life. In the search for alternative and, in a sense, more realistic perspectives, Jem Bendell’s concept of “Deep Adaptation”, which has been widely and controversially discussed since its first publication in 2018, calls for a shift: he urges us to prepare for the collapse of certain systems that currently govern our lives – and to see this as an opportunity for positive change.
This change and the resulting challenges we are facing are primarily not technological, but above all social, economic, and organisational in nature. Moreover, they are highly interdependent and all-encompassing; they require systemic change, profound transformations, and adaptations of action. It is therefore not a question of developing technical solutions in isolation, but rather of fundamentally rethinking the way we live, operate, work, travel, and interact.
This issue of SPOOL seeks to explore the spatial dimension of the Deep Adaptation concept and how it can be put to use in the spatial disciplines such as urban planning, landscape planning, urban design, and architecture
Data-driven Urban Design: Conceptual and Methodological Interpretations of Negroponte’s ‘Architecture Machine’
Full text linkNicholas Negroponte and MIT’s Architecture Machine Group speculated in the 1970s about computational processes that were open to participation, incorporating end-user preferences and democratizing urban design. Today’s ‘smart city’ technologies, using the monitoring of people’s movement and activity patterns to offer more effective and responsive services, might seem like contemporary interpretations of Negroponte’s vision, yet many of the collectors of user information are disconnected from urban policy making. This article presents a series of theoretical and procedural experiments conducted through academic research and teaching, developing user-driven generative design processes in the spirit of ‘The Architecture Machine’. It explores how new computational tools for site analysis and monitoring can enable datadriven urban place studies, and how these can be connected to generative strategies for public spaces and environments at various scales. By breaking down these processes into separate components of gathering, analysing, translating and implementing data, and conceptualizing them in relation to urban theory, it is shown how data-driven urban design processes can be conceived as an open-ended toolkit to achieve various types of user-driven outcomes. It is argued that architects and urban designers are uniquely situated to reflect on the benefits and value systems that control data-driven processes, and should deploy these to deliver more resilient, liveable and participatory urban spaces
It’s too late for pessimism: How the Deep Adaptation Agenda is relevant for teaching in the spatial disciplines
Full text linkThe crises we face today call for a careful assessment of our collective and individual understandings and responses. The past decades have shown us that acknowledgement of the emergencies alone is not sufficient to address the problems, especially within the complex context and conditions of the built environment. In the face of ‘inevitable’ change, and of current and future challenges, this urges us to direct a critical glance towards how we understand and frame the problems as spatial practitioners, how we position ourselves towards them, and how our ethical and professional responsibilities and agencies must change. As an open question and a long-term endeavour, this echoes within the context of academia. However, a central position has yet to emerge. In this article, we give an account of our experiences by taking a closer look at the approaches, formats, and method we have employed at the Professorship of Urban Design at TU Munich and elaborate on how these concerns can be embedded in the content, systems, and structures of teaching, and how the Deep Adaptation Agenda plays a facilitating role in this ongoing attempt
‘Greening’ the Cities: How Data Can Drive Interdisciplinary Connections to Foster Ecological Solutions
Full text linkWe are facing an urgent global environmental crisis that requires a reframing of traditional professional and conceptual boundaries within the urban environment. Complex and multidisciplinary issues need complex and multidisciplinary solutions, which result from the collaboration of many different disciplines concerned with the urban environment. A more integrated ecological perspective that recognizes the complexity of urban environments and resituates our ‘artificial’ or human-made world within its natural ecosystem can facilitate this shift towards greater knowledge exchange. C40 Cities case studies provide a framework within which to understand the disciplines and scales encompassed by ecological solutions, while projects at MIT Senseable City Lab and CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati highlight how data is used as a tool in driving ecological solutions. The artificial world of sensors, data and networks creates a bridge between the ‘artificial’ and ‘natural’ elements of our urban environments, allowing us to fully understand the present condition, connect city users and decision makers, and better integrate ecological solutions into the built environment
Data-driven design for Architecture and Environment Integration
Full text linkRapid urbanization and related land cover and land use changes are primary causes of climate change, and of environmental and ecosystem degradation. Sustainability problems are becoming increasingly complex due to these developments. At the same time vast amounts of data on urbanization, construction and resulting environmental conditions are being generated. Yet it is hardly possible to gain insights for sustainable plan-ning and design at the same rate as data is generated. Moreover, the complexity of compound sustainability problems requires interdisciplinary approaches that address multiple knowledge fields, multiple dynamics and multiple spatial, temporal and functional scales. This raises a question regarding methods and tools available to planners and architects for tackling these complex issues. To address this problem we are developing an interdisciplinary approach, computational framework and related workflows for multi-domain and trans-scalar modelling that integrate planning and design scales. For this article two lines of research were selected. The first focuses on understanding environments for the purpose of discovering, recovering and adapting land knowledge to different conditions and contexts. This entails an analytical data-integrated computational workflow. The second line of research focuses on designing environments and developing an approach and computational workflow for data-integrated planning and design. These two lines converge in a combined analytical and generative data-integrated computational workflow. This combined approach aims for an intense integration of architectures and environments that we call embedded architectures. In this article we discuss the two lines of research, their convergence, and further research questions