Multidimensionality
Field_LA
Is the analysis phase of landscape
architecture due for a makeover? Do aerial mapping techniques give the designer
a hint of the ephemeral and dynamic nature of things? Perhaps techniques
borrowed from the fine arts offer the possibility of helping us to explore how
landscapes work? Or at the very least, provide a
distinctive way of documenting and interpreting the landscape.
It was our
hunch that focusing on the moments that regularly occur, but are often
overlooked in the landscape, such as birds flying, children running, and cars
moving would contribute to a greater understanding of how a landscape actually
worked.
An area we
thought worth exploring was the work of the Cubists and with their interest in
multiple veiwpoints and therefore the conclusion in a single image of the
temporal. And more recently, David
Hockney’s collage work and large panoramas.
Pablo Piccaso’s work Femme Couchee,
for example, and the work of the analytical phase of Cubism in general
demonstrates the dismantling of objects and having analysed them into component
elements rearranging them in a new order.
This new articulation reiterates the sentiments of the
Abstractionists. The potency and
relevance of this new articulation is reinforced by the Abstractionists’ belief
that no imitation can ever reflect the strength and beauty in the appearance of
nature. In order to depict nature fully
we must find another way.[1] The exploration, outlined below, at Cornwall Park in Auckland, New
Zealand permits landscape moments recorded in photographs to contribute to the
landscape design process in a way that realises a multidimensional
understanding of the site.
To begin we utilised the camera to
initially record information. At this
stage the pictures were just that – pictures, which contained formal notions of
perspective, a particular way of seeing the image, from a distance and in a
static frozen ‘moment’. Picasso’s works
are often seen as distortions or abstract works, however if we introduce the
notion of time to the way we think about his works, we can begin to read them
differently. Take the two archetypal
styles of theatre; the Italian style where the stage is a box that contains
backdrops that create the illusion of distance and perspective; and the
Shakespearian style of theatre where the stage juts out into the audience so
that everyone who views the theatre sees something different. Picasso’s paintings can be described as working
in the same way as the latter of these two examples. They are in fact just another way of
seeing. It is as if the image is moving
in time and we can see behind, beside and in front at the same time. This is an idea we thought would be useful
for landscape architecture. What if we
could articulate site information in this alternative multi-dimensional way,
rather than a distanced static view as is normative with the types of methods
we use to collect information and also in the way we represent that
information?
The Landscape is encoded with the
ephemeral, the moment, intensities and forces.
Looking at landscapes from the bottom up, or upside down, enables a
different viewpoint. By eluding familiar
form and by viewing the landscape apart from its usual connections to objects
and materiality, a new clarity becomes apparent, in much the same way as when
drawing, if the concentration is focused on acute observation of the subject,
rather than on thinking ‘can I draw?’, the outcome is startlingly
competent. This cognitive shift enables
preconceptions about the landscape to be downplayed and ways of analysing the
landscape to be enhanced.
The new drawings have folded in, and are encoded
with, temporal information contained within photographs. This is an augmentation of the more usual use
of photographs to determine, for instance, the facilitating or screening of
view shafts, or analysis of existing landscape structures.
Images that are stylised, abstracted, and distorted
can often be dismissed as not being like the world, because they don’t look
like the world. Our drawings could be
seen as such distortions. It is easy to
hold up a photograph and say, ‘see, this is what it looks like’. However, when we do this we are accepting one
viewpoint, one angle, perspectival rules, and the concept of outside looking
in. Our work attempts to achieve a
multidimensional understanding of site photography, in particular, images,
which record landscape moments. This
multidimensional perspective offers other ways of interpreting and
understanding the forces and flows (made up of intensities and individual
moments) that are functioning in and through the site. The process by which we have gone about this
highlights the idea that landscape architecture is a regulator, meaning that
this design process taps into the forces and flows, and extracts intensities
and expresses them in terms of configurations and forms. This, rather than providing one solution for
site problems or coming up with a static design for a bounded area, provides
directives for the way the designer could go about configuring the
landscape.
In order to engage with forces and intensities it is necessary to engage
with what may, at first, seem to be abstractions or distortions. The ‘real’ views contained within the initial
photographs taken at the beginning of this technique do not immediately reveal
the underlying qualities embedded in them.
This technique enabled us to
construct images that encompass the assemblage of conditions associated with
various events. Multidimensionality
differs from the use of plans and maps because it offers, in the case of the
birds flying composition, concepts of here, there and not there, change, chance
and potentiality. This is as opposed to
numbers of birds, flight paths, species that can be represented through maps and
denote ‘fixed’ conditions. Our technique
attempts to capture the more ephemeral and also functional characteristics of
the birds and register their effects against the landscape. What results are an
assemblage of effects registered against surrounding landscape in the diagrams
change chance, stack shift, and move transform.
The analysis of the original photographs utilising this technique
reveals qualities such as: the constant evolution of landscapes through adding,
removing and recombining conditions, minute changes in behaviour within the
assemblage can radically alter formations and, movements of forces layer up on
landscapes so that we determine intersections of layers on a plane as well as
the forces move through landscapes distorting and altering entire assemblages.
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