Landscape – Great Idea! X-LArch III - Department für Raum ...

121
Deciphering
The goal of deciphering is to understand the complex
and aggregated influences that appear, disappear, and
reappear in a place. Always elusive and forever changing,
influences are internal and external forms and
forces, building the history of a place, as well as creating
seeds for many potential futures. They are relational, as
opposed to scalar, meaning their effect is not associated
with size or locale, and is not limited to the legal boundaries
of a site. Deciphering is an alternative to positivistic
and reductionist modes of thinking – all too common in
conventional practice – that construe a site as a cleared,
“muted ground” [5] upon which developers and their
designers intend to act (Beauregard 2005). The primary
shortcoming of this perspective is that sites become
simplified, rationalized and reduced, with a narrow or
singular ambition to provide a canvas for something new.
Alternatively, deciphering reveals the complex systems,
relations, and aggregated narratives embedded in every
site, providing a foundation, point of departure, and framework
for design action.
In addition to understanding the complex and interwoven
logics of a place, deciphering is a means for revealing a
multitude of latent orders that would provide an armature
for organizing new materials and programs. This
approach is substantiated by the work of accomplished
landscape architects and is very different from the notion
of site as “muted ground” [6]. The designer seeks to not
only record the forms present, but to also understand the
forces that created them. Activities of visiting, researching,
mapping, cross-mapping, datascaping, and analyzing
are coupled with intuitive and artful abstractions and
interpretations. Deciphering allows the designer to engage
the rich aggregated influences with which every site is
endowed, and sets the stage for site design through the
strategies of scripting, framing, and stewardship.
Scripting
Scripting begins with understanding the potency of
specific processes working in a place, and continues
with engaging them as active agents of design. Sites
are open to flows and fluxes of larger systems that move
through, upon, and over them, such as weather, social
patterns, information exchange, wildlife movements,
and hydrological systems. Nonlinear dynamics provides
insights into the often surprising effects of emergent
phenomena that occur as a result of random interactions
between complex systems. Through systemic interactions,
seemingly benign design decisions on a site may
have profound consequences in surprising locations.
Although it would be impossible to predict all of these
potential occurrences, the strategy of deciphering brings
to light the systems at play, providing the information
required for scripting. Scripting enables a designer to
become a process architect: to actively add to or to edit
away from the systems that are present and/or introduce
new systems or catalytic agents.
The Dutch design firm Vista practices a form of deciphering
and scripting, which they call “process design”.
They seek to “unravel and manipulate the underlying
processes in the landscape as well as the infrastructure
that forms them” (van Gerwen 2004: 233). Roel Van Gerwen
uses the analogy of building a pile of sand on the
beach: “you can form a mound of sand with a bucket and
a shovel, then the mound will disappear with the wind
over time. The alternative is to place a large stick in the
ground where the wind will instantly form a pile, reshaping
the pile every time the wind changes its direction. In
this analogy, placing the stick is less exhausting, gives
a less predictable result and is highly dynamic” (van
Gerwen 2004: 233).
Framing
Framing sets the organizational and programmatic
parameters for a site and strategically evolves alongside
scripting. Framing introduces geometries that first
respond to the armatures and influences uncovered
during deciphering, and second sponsor newly scripted
processes [7]. Recent shifts in ecological thinking parallel
concepts in complexity and nonlinear dynamics and
support the relationship between scripting and framing.
These new theories focus on nonequilibrium ecologies
and the relationship between material/spatial patterns
and the processes that they influence (Hill 2001, Hill
2005, Cook 2000). The notion of integrated pattern and
process organization can be understood to apply to many
complex systems relevant to landscape architecture. For
example, Michael Batty has determined that bottom-up,
self-organization of complex systems is fundamental to
the order of urban spatial patterns (Batty 2005). The
aggregate patterns we observe in ecological and urban
systems alike are more influenced by localized events
and system interactions than single totalizing decisions.
Yet these patterns exist within an infrastructural framework.
Patterns of vegetation and wildlife evolve because
of a material framework including geomorphology,
topography, solar orientation, and gross hydrological
systems. Cities grow and change within a framework
that includes these conditions as well as infrastructures
comprised of streets, transit systems, utilities, and green
corridors. Frameworks are enduring while the patterns
that result are temporal, adaptive, and always changing.
Framing organizes the physical structures that sponsor
the emergence of self-organizing systems and their related
patterns.
An example of scripting and framing is the „Virgin Pool of
Earth“ by landscape artist Alan Sonfist. The site work is
located in a contaminated and toxic landscape near the
Love Canal in New York. Sonfist created a “seed cat-
Papers