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

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The traditions of landscape scholarship and practice are
so deeply ingrained that adapting to an “alternative” or
“new” technology is, for some, more effort than they can
imagine it is worth.
Figure 4: steam plant figure ground studies, 2005.
Before receiving input on their site analysis conclusions,
the students were asked to return to the site to conduct
a second analysis, this time with a video camera. Video
captured consisted of views from multiple vantage points
and an extensive collection of panoramic shots. Before
leaving the site, however, the students used the video camera
to capture footage of each other engaging with the
various elements of the site in whimsical, even farcical
ways.
Figure 5: screen captures from Steam Plant, 2005.
When they returned to the studio, the students were
asked to edit their footage as a component of their inventory.
The “serious” footage was edited into a very static
and unimaginative collection of video pans, shot systematically
from various points throughout the site. Students
were forbidden from using any sound not natural to
the environment they were documenting.
In a twist of fate, a group of the same students undertook
to edit their “other” footage: the images of them
whimsically interacting with the remnant features of the
site. When seeing these features as props, these young
designers perceived the space quite differently. As their
design schemes developed for the site, these features
became the focus of the design proposals. Of the 23
design concepts produced for this landscape, 21 of the
schemes kept the industrial remnants of the site. The
other 2 schemes kept only the most visible feature: the
water tower.
Limitations
As a medium, video can be challenging. To realize its full
potential, it must be viewed in its intended format: with
pictures that move and with sound that can be heard.
Video also requires that it be captured manually. As
an impressively large cache of still photographic data
is becoming available to us online through applications
such as GoogleEarth, video still needs to be captured by
somebody on the ground.
When it is captured, it is almost always captured from
the point of view of a human eye. While this is arguably
a more natural way of viewing landscapes, this limited
perspective does not afford us the same sense of scale
of aerial photography.
The technology that is required to capture and edit
video is readily available and easy to use. The greatest
limitation facing the use of video as an instrument and
method of landscape study is arguably little more than
our mind-set.
Conclusion
The Great Ideas of landscape are many and varied.
They span perspectives, scales, contexts and continents.
Great Ideas can be reflected in, or inspired by,
landscapes. By knowing the motives for understanding
the Great Ideas of landscape, we can identify and adapt
the most appropriate methods and means to investigate,
analyze and interpret the meanings of place.
We have made impressive strides in understanding place
and in our ability to represent the meanings of landscape.
In the past few decades, we have refined the technology
and the skills that enable us to expertly map the bio-geographical
conditions of the earth’s surface the world over.
As our advancements have resulted in vast improvements
in the way we understand the physical attributes of
landscape, the technologies and advanced methods for
understanding the human perspective of landscape have
not been as impressive.
Landscape perception has, for better or worse, focused
almost entirely landscape’s visual attributes. The act
of “seeing” is a good start in the process of building an
understanding of the Great Ideas of landscape. Still,
“seeing” is very different from “knowing.”
Video is a visual medium that offers collection and presentation
of other spatial attributes such as sound and
motion. It provides a rich repository of spatial cues that
significantly bolster the inventories that form the basis of
our landscape analysis. Video is a dynamic medium. It
offers expressive communication of ideas in a form that
other media simply cannot.