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

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Inventory
In the same way that video affords us the benefit of
an alternate perspective in the analysis stage, viewing
a landscape through this unconventional framework
leads us to re-evaluate the elements of a site and how
a landscape’s users might interact with those elements.
Focusing on these elements in the inventory and analysis
stage, we consequently have a richer repository from
which to recognize opportunities or draw inspiration.
Analysis
Much of the way we think about a landscape is based
on what we remember about it. We base our initial
judgments of an unfamiliar place on what we know of a
place familiar to us. Our knowledge and understanding
of a place deepens as we continue our intimate contact
with it. The more rich the material is that we have
available to us as we re-collect, the more meaningful
that contact will become. Notes and photographs help
remind us of the details of a landscape. However,
access to media rich in attribute data helps do a better
job recalling the sentient qualities of the landscapes we
have experienced.
Interpretation
The discipline of landscape has long been recognized as
a creative pursuit. It has remained open to a wide range
of methods used to express the qualities and meanings
of landscape. The use of these methods and the production
of their communicative outcomes have been essential
to reinforcing our understanding and interpretation
of the characteristics of a landscape and the meanings
behind it. Re-viewing landscape video is an experience
that provides a richness of detail, detail that can be
essential to reconfirming the sense of a place we have
come to understand.
Visualization
Visualization enables us to take what we know about a
landscape and layer over it a vision, idea or concept of
change.
Referential Imaging
Video images of one landscape can be used to visualize
and communicate designs, ideas and concepts for another.
In practice, this process is known as “imaging” and
has traditionally used “image boards” to convey a sense
of a proposed concept.
Video can be used in precisely the same way. Video
images of the elements and the arrangement of elements
from an existing space can be used to suggest how
another might be seen. Video can also be composited.
By isolating specific elements in a scene, other elements
can be superimposed over, behind or within a video
scene.
Abstract Visualization
Abstract visualization relies on the creative production of
an “image” to express ideas about a landscape. In our
discussion on video, we can include again the introduction
of audio as a component of abstract visualization.
Sound can be composited with images to produce
thought-provoking representations that contrast the
aural attributes of one space with the visual attributes of
another. Through abstract visualization, designers manipulate
spatial attributes that are typically disregarded in
conventional processes.
Communication
Video enables designers to present their interpretations
and concepts for interventions in much more dynamic
ways by using video. Layering sound and capitalizing on
video’s ability to convey senses of motion makes it easier
for an audience to get a sense of the total attributes of a
landscape by hearing its sounds while moving through its
spaces.
Landscape Video Case Study
Many of the benefits of using video as a landscape tool
have been supported by its use in multiple landscape
projects. One project in particular suggests that video
can compel new ways of seeing a landscape’s inherent
design potential.
Steam Plant
In the university studio, students were asked to explore
design options for a post-industrial site. Relying on
conventional methods of site inventory and analysis the
students produced synthesis plans that called for demolishing
all the site’s industrial remnants except one: a
three story brick building. Features identified for demolition
included site and retaining walls, rail tracks and a
water tower.
Figure 3: water tower screen capture from: Steam Plant, 2005.
Papers