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

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Fig. 1: Ideogram of study process
mation as well as an objective decision-making process
overlaid with a transparency of subjectivity.
Volume 1: Atlas of referential landscapes
The Frameworks Volume 1 describes and catalogs the
cantonal landscape. To highlight landscape evolution,
the photographer collected postcards from the early 20th
century and returned to the recapture the same point of
view. To better understand the territory, the team took five
tours to gather the necessary information for formulating a
course of action. The son of the team’s historian, a twelve
year old boy, took the task of mapping the tours and of
determining arbitrary stops every 10 kilometers to gain a
random and perhaps accurate cross-section of both the
referential (beautiful, historic, diverse) landscapes as well
as the landscapes pressured by the contemporary issues
confronting us. At each stop the team captured the landscape
through photo panoramas, video, and collective,
exquisite corpse-like sketches.
The preliminary evaluations resulted in the identification
of 24 landscapes of reference and 21 landscape entities.
The entities can be understood as more global geomorphological
conditions while the referential landscapes are
described and differentiated with more detail and nuance.
Determining factors include history, gestation, topography,
tree structure, forest type, distribution of agricultural land,
organization of villages and buildings, and water networks.
Each of these referential landscapes are represented with
a diagram cross referenced with the palette of typologies,
a locator map, a list of salient characteristics, a representative
image, a collection of our group on-site sketches,
and two texts (one written by the historian about how this
landscape came to be and one written by the agronomist
about how it is currently managed). Also, an ideogram
attempts to summarize the landscape characteristics in a
more interpretive and subjective manner. With the help of
Volume 2, Landscape Typologies, the Frameworks study
identifies and defines a definitive atlas of referential landscapes
that are to act as a knowledge base for informing
decision-making processes. [Fig. 3]
Volume 2: Palette of landscape typologies
Volume 2, a Cantonal landscape palette, was inserted into
the project out of necessity as the Vaud planning community
lacked a common vocabulary of landscapes. The
palette of a region’s most important landscape typologies
is meant to be a cross-reference, or dictionary of sorts
to ground discussions and frame descriptions with a
clear and cogent language. It serves as the basis to the
establishment of a territorial observatory, complete with
a set of tools, whose objectives are for the identification,
evaluation, appreciation and even vulgarization of the rural
cantonal landscapes.
The palette is organized into seven deliberately non-scientific,
and easy to understand categories realized from
a purely empirical point of view, avoiding professional
Fig. 2: Final 4 Volume report
Papers