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

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cher” from a twenty-five foot diameter, six-foot deep hole
by filling it with a clay-based virgin soil and rimming the
edges with a cobble lip (Spaid). The rimmed pool collects
seeds brought by wind and animal movements and holds
rainwater, resulting in a growing and vibrant landscape
in the midst of an industrial wasteland. In this example,
framing is understood to be introducing viable soil and
constructing a cobble rim. Through these material organizations,
Sonfist scripted the resulting seed and water
capture and a new ecological future for the site.
Stewardship
The strategy of stewardship provides the means for a
place to maintain cultural relevance through time. It supplants
common landscape maintenance policies, which
often fall into one of two categories: over-regulation of
landscape process through mechanical and chemical
means (resulting in artificial stasis and toxic environments)
or a complete failure to provide necessary attention
to changing dynamics (resulting in a cultural perception
of neglect and abandonment). Stewardship is first a
strategy of constant deciphering as landscape influences
continually change, and second a nurturing, artful and
highly selective refining of a place through time. The role
of stewardship suggests rethinking conventional relationships
with clients, in which representational ideas would
be supplemented with ongoing advising [8]. The focus of
stewardship is understanding and engaging landscape
change through time.
of a site and revealing latent armatures for process and
material organization. Through scripting and framing, a
designer may apply this knowledge to a site by engaging
and catalyzing processes within a designed material
framework. Stewardship provides a designer with the
strategic means to engage a site through time such that it
remains adaptive and culturally relevant.
This overview provides a point of departure for further
exploration. Upcoming scholarship will investigate the
nuances of each of the four strategies through further
conceptual development as well as testing and implementation
in landscape architecture projects. Future work
will also focus on integrating additional strategies as they
emerge from this scholarship and the evolving work of
others.
A complex system changes in two ways: quickly and
dramatically when it reaches a tipping point, and incrementally
through adaptation. A system relies on adaptation
for survival by constantly reorganizing in response to
feedback from its surroundings. (Taylor 2001) The role
of the steward is to provide the link in the feedback loop
between changes in cultural or ecological conditions, and
to make timely and exacting edits, additions, or refinements
to the geometric organization of a site‘s framework.
Stewardship is a maintenance strategy that would
promote resilience by striving to uphold the processes
and conceptual legacy of a site, but allow it to physically
morph over time as conditions warrant. Stewards would
be artful designers who precisely engage the processes
of a site within the context of ever-changing cultural
conditions.
Conclusion
A complexity ethos and the four practice strategies provide
a means for landscape architects to design projects of
environmental and societal sensitivity, performance, resilience
and enduring cultural relevance within our complex
nonlinear world. Beginning with an ethos that contextualizes
landscape in complexity and nonlinear dynamics,
designers approach a project with informed intuition. Deciphering
involves identifying the aggregated influences