Manufacturing Resonance (original) (raw)
Related papers
Landscapes of Variance: Working the Gap between Design and Nature
Huack, T et al. 2015. Revising Green Infrastructure: Concepts Between Nature and Design. Taylor and Francis., 2015
Between the abstractions of design and interventions in the land, there are variances, deviations, and gaps. These manifest as a physical interstice between the resistant conditions of the land and conceptualized interventions, and they reveal moments in the design process that refuse the seamless transitions from the schematic to the realized. As landscapes are repeatedly transformed through the dynamic relationships between people and the land, these gaps open up questions and spaces of creative possibility. Smithson wrote that between site and non-site, exists “a space of metaphorical significance” (1968). He proposed non-site as an abstraction of a physical geographical site that can come to represent the site but without the need to resemble it, his indoor earthworks constructing a new logic and potentially physical relationship between land and occupant.
Past Present Future_The Landscape as Design Collaborator.pdf
ACSA, 2018
The contemporary practice of designing the built environment is dominated by a top-down approach that imposes rules and boundaries from above, favoring grid-based geometries and hard edges, regardless of the latent potential in the landscape. By not working with the place-specific landscape in the design process, we have been altering the environment in uniformed ways that have led to generic urban form, ecological degradation, and cities that lack resilience and adaptability in the face of growing threats from climate change. We are unlikely to fix the problems of cities by using the same toolbox that got us there in the first place. It is time to define a new approach that begins with a knowledge of the landscape past, present, and future. This will be of particular importance at the edge of cities that mitigate the relationship between the “built” and “natural,” especially coastal communities that are threatened by inundation from sea-level rise and storm events. By utilizing techniques in site analysis as a design driver, I propose that we reflect on past landscape conditions, urban transformations, and a layering of present environmental conditions to inform speculative future scenarios that lead to new relationships between urbanism and ecology.
Revaluating ecology in contemporary landscape design
2012
Ecology, as a field of science, has become one of the integral part of the planning and design disciplines since mid twenties. Growing awareness of local and global environmental decline gave rise to the appreciation of ecology and its implementation in design and planning works. Different channels have been investigating to understand and discover the interface between ecology and design and to find plausible ways to solve environmental defects. Within interdisciplinary design medium, landscape architecture appears to be the most active agent to engage with environment from different pathways. Today, the modes of this engagement is redefined with respect to the changing nature of contemporary city and new demands which further lead a shift in landscape design theory and praxis. This shift underlies an ecological understanding in which ecology is revaluated by designer’s creative mind sets via investigating, managing and manipulating the ecological knowledge to respond current envir...
Past, Present, Future: The Landscape as Design Collaborator
106th ACSA Annual Meeting Proceedings, The Ethical Imperative, 2018
The contemporary practice of designing the built environment is dominated by a top-down approach that imposes rules and boundaries from above, favoring grid-based geometries and hard edges, regardless of the latent potential in the landscape. By not working with the place-specific landscape in the design process, we have been altering the environment in uniformed ways that have led to generic urban form, ecological degradation, and cities that lack resilience and adaptability in the face of growing threats from climate change. We are unlikely to fix the problems of cities by using the same toolbox that got us there in the first place. It is time to define a new approach that begins with a knowledge of the landscape past, present, and future. This will be of particular importance at the edge of cities that mitigate the relationship between the "built" and "natural," especially coastal communities that are threatened by inundation from sea-level rise and storm events. By utilizing techniques in site analysis as a design driver, I propose that we reflect on past landscape conditions, urban transformations, and a layering of present environmental conditions to inform speculative future scenarios that lead to new relationships between urbanism and ecology.
Revising Green Infrastructure, 2014
In the past decade or two, the functional value of landscapes has (re)gained interest. This affects landscape design in several manners, foremost by redefining the meaning and scope of “design.” Functional design may not be the exclusive expertise of landscape architects, but also of ecologists, planners, eco-tech firms, and those responsible for land management. Terms such as ecosystem services, climate-proof design, green investments, and landscape infrastructure mark a paradigm shift from beautification and preservation to landscape-related production. The purpose, it appears, is to argue that natural processes can contribute to economic and geopolitical benefits as part of a more general turn to sustainable development. Ecosystems and biodiversity should no longer be isolated aims, but part of a larger framework to synthesize natural and cultural expressions and benefit both. This is reflecting a staggering ambition. It is both related to an unimaginably large and diverse set of data and an equally large complexity of interrelationships.
From Metaphor to Model: Expanding Ecologically-Informed Design
In recent years, practitioners and researchers in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture and urban design have become increasingly interested in developing ecologically-informed design strategies. Within this setting, ecology is not simply a synonym for the environment, nor does it necessarily suggest a ‘green’ agenda; instead, it emphasizes a system-based holistic perspective of a given context. With such a definition in mind, a growing body of work acknowledges lessons acquired from ecological science, presenting natural systems as dynamic, interconnected, resilient, complex and indeterminate, and attempts to situate strategies for design within this flux. Yet, the tools and methods currently used by designers with which to advance such work are limited. The familiar practice of mapping, in formats such as spatial maps, timelines, organizational diagrams, and other modes of visualization, is the central driver currently used in presenting, synthesizing and mobilizing ecologically-oriented, systems-based design interventions. However, in most cases, such drivers are offered as-is, with little explication of their validity, assumptions and limits, and, as a result, are fundamentally bounded by the limits of ecological metaphor. Although metaphor is recognized as a useful communication tool across disciplines, there is a “rich technical world” that stands behind it; one which offers much opportunity to ecologically-informed design practice. Surpassing the boundaries of ecological metaphor demands a set of tools which can deal with managing the dynamic processes and forces, flows and feedback loops, which characterize ecological systems. While current techniques are helpful in isolating and abstracting certain aspects of these ecosystems, much of their inherent complexity is lost due to our human limits in managing and working with complex, parallel relational chains. Herein rests an opportunity for computational design to appropriate ecological modeling, as a point of access to the full technical richness of ecological science. In this context, the computational designer is able to abstract a problem for initial action and then, relying on the machine as an automatic accountant, incrementally rebuild the lost complexity, thereby allowing the relevant characteristics of the problem space to be maintained. An appropriation of ecological modeling into design practice offers a parametric and relational framework for advancing ecologically-informed design as a process of formation, which affords both generative and exploratory opportunities to the development of landscape infrastructure. Similarly, hybrid ecological models, which couple multi-disciplinary parameters and characteristics, offer a mechanism for simulating emergent ecological-urban possibility spaces, extending a designers ability to both navigate and cultivate epigenetic potentials, toward the formation of a synergistic territory where human-centered needs and ecosystem logics coexist to mutual benefit. Such a vision need not be utopian; emerging thinking and investigation surrounding natural capital and ecosystem services suggest that market-driven metrics need not be left behind. Drawing on existing precedents around the world of such redirected agency, we can begin to speculate on a new future for the post-industrial city that resists simple categorization and advances a new language for emerging landscape potentials.