Site Matters: Prototyping the Landscape Experiment Station
laboratory: a place providing opportunity for experimentation, observation, or practice in a field of study We propose a collaborative independent study that allows MLA students to investigate the potential of a School of Architecture Landscape Experiment Station at UVA’s Milton Airfield. What can we learn by being on-site and engaged with our medium and tools for the length of a semester? How can a land laboratory, defined as a space for experimentation, observation, practice, disturbance, and maintenance as it relates to landscape architecture, enrich design education and the field of landscape architecture? With the collective goal of creating a landscape experimentation station proof-of-concept, students will explore research questions, methods, and tools that test the possibilities of long-term, field-based landscape and design experiments implemented on one site over time. Students will engage in semester-long collaborative work geared towards researching, ideating, and prototyping a landscape laboratory space, infrastructure, and methodology. Each student will implement their own semester-long design research project that grounds and continuously feeds the collective inquiry and study of the landscape experiment station proof-of-concept. Students will operate as a collective, accountable to each other for discussion, presentation of work, and critique. We will prototype the experiment station through five individual explorations in tandem. We see our process as iterative, our methods and their results informing one another over the course of the semester. Experiencing Site: Viewing Milton Airfield as a landscape laboratory allows us to ask more open-ended questions about the site, develop new methods for site analysis/probing, and test both novel and typical tools in a dynamic setting. Through the lens of our individual projects and collective prototype, we will experience Milton through site immersion and curiosity- driven site analysis. Designing Research: Individual design research projects will form a collective proof-of-concept for how a landscape lab provides time and space for novel, hands-on, material design research that both pushes and compliments representational work in the studio. What kinds of design research does Milton make possible? How do these projects accumulate as a living archive? Our individual projects will allow us to directly test possibilities and predict necessities for a long-term landscape laboratory. Creating Praxis: We aim to create a real-time praxis, a feedback loop between weekly discussion, writing, research on site, and representation. While conducting individual research, we will explore the larger concept and pedagogical goals of a landscape lab through precedent studies, readings, and discussion. Our direct experience through our work at Milton will allow us to answer fundamental questions: What is landscape? What is design? What is a lab?
Site Matters: Prototyping the Landscape Experiment Station
Independent Research Abstracts Hannah Brown | “Designing With: Soil Seed Banks as Site Histories // Seed Saving as Maintenance Practice” I plan to research soil seed banks as site histories and as non-human design collaborators. I will ask -- what if the soil seed bank is treated as a site-specific history and seed saving a form of site maintenance? How might we express the soil seed bank through design interventions and how might we manipulate it? Through cataloging existing vegetation and seed strategies, saving seed on site, and making interventions (test plots) that question how the soil seed bank will be expressed following specific disturbances, I will study seed banks as inherited site legacies with narrative potential, rather than something to be repressed immediately upon design installation. Supplementary research will ponder the role of seed saving in adaptation, biodiversity, disturbance response, hybridization, companion species relationships, and reciprocal, site-based landscape practices. Reid Farnsworth | “Edge Practice: Affecting Edge Effects” What if extensive observation, documentation, and probing of edge conditions and their ecological-aesthetic effects was distilled to create design prototypes that disturb, amplify, create and/or blur edge effects? A multi-scalar investigation of edge typologies at Milton – plant communities, river, and adjacent site conditions – is relevant to the larger question of how design engages with increasingly mercurial edge conditions catalyzed by floods, sea level rise, and urban development. Fields from real estate to landscape architecture acknowledge the unique ecological and economic effects of when distinct conditions meet and blend. However, distilling the aesthetic, ecological, and conceptual potentials of edge effects through mapping and photo documentation of existing conditions and designed disturbance at Milton Airfield could explore how small interventions such as planting, transplanting, mowing, and excavating of edge conditions creates an “edge practice” that considers edge as central to site design. Rebecca Hinch | “The People’s Topo: Explorations in Microtopography” I plan to investigate how microtopographic variations could create spaces and encourage plant growth in “non-designed” or “informal” settings, such as productive gardens, vacant lots, and idle fields. Limited by the availability of tools and financial constraints, how might one grade a site to improve conditions for both its human and nonhuman inhabitants? In addition, how could grading be responsive to, rather than impose upon, a site, while still effecting change? By first assessing the present soil and topographic conditions at Milton Airfield and then hand-grading selected areas (i.e. demonstration sites) in response to the soil type and other materials present, I plan to explore what minimal interventions and maintenance regimes could effectively mitigate (or encourage) erosion and create variations in microclimates. While prior research indicates that microtopographic variations are positively correlated with diversity in flora and fauna, exploring this topic with an understanding of the average person’s resources could increase accessibility to grading as a tool beyond the fields of engineering and design.
Site Matters: Prototyping the Landscape Experiment Station Lizzie Needham | “Living Fencing” I plan to research living fencing through gardening maintenance (ie. pruning) on vegetation and other materials found on site in order to test cultural and material conventions and connotations of fencing, culminating in a series of experimental prototype dynamic fences. Some of the questions I would like to explore are: How can material choices allow a fence to become more than just a barrier? How does a living fence change over time to increase human and non human engagement? Can fences serve as connective tissue and arteries for biodiversity in a landscape? When is it appropriate to create a fence from materials found onsite, versus outsourcing materials? How can maintenance of vegetation inform fence materials? Theodore Teichman | “Designing Decay--Democratizing Landscape Materials” I will investigate the question what if we turned urban waste into living matter through composting, incinerating, fermenting, decomposing, brewing urban debris with microbial cultures in order transform pollutants and brownfields into community assets, culminating in a repository of compost test plots and a prototype of a DIY citizen scientist decay lab. While prior work has been done on this topic to indicate oyster mushrooms can digest plastics and compost teas have become popular throughout the permaculture world, applying the lens of DIY culture and the belief in the radical power in access to tools and knowledge would allow us to understand better not only new materials for landscape practice, but a new practice that is incubates and incorporates a participatory democracy at the level of the material.
Site Matters: Prototyping the Landscape Experiment Station
Schedule + Framework Students will meet 3 hrs. on site once a week during designated class time (day TBD upon course approval according to student schedules). Students will spend 6 hrs. working outside of class, visiting the site as needed while working on research, drawing, writing, prototyping, etc. EXPERIENCE AND DEFINE: Week 1-5 week 1 // Ground rules: Collective statement of intent, accountability, objectives, spelunking week 2 // Experience: Site Assessment. Document initial impressions. week 3 // Define: Historic, literature, and place review to define landscape lab mission week 4 // Experience: Collective Site Assessment. Surveying site conditions for future benefit. week 5 // Define: Collective vision for the Landscape Experiment Station Group presentations Overview: Individual students will assess the site through their medium and design question of interest. Since each student has chosen a topic within a different medium (ie. hydrology, earth and topography, vegetation etc.), we predict that we will be able to gather substantial information about the site as a collective. Findings and analysis will be shared via the course website and in discussion format to begin a collaborative resource for the land-lab. While students engage with their own questions, they will also take note and document what tools and processes will be critical for the development of a Landscape Experiment Station. Deliverables: collective: website, written statement of intent, accountability and objectives, check-ins about individual design questions, ongoing documentation and resource creation for site analysis individual: research questions and design abstracts, general exploration of site, literature and precedent research and presentation, surveying, mapping, onsite observation, collection, testing, and documentation IDEATE AND PROTOTYPE: Week 6-10 week 6 // Ideate: Develop individual project questions and research week 7 // Ideate + Prototype: Develop individual project proposals and initial documentation week 8 // Prototype: Install or Intervene at Milton week 9 // Prototype + Test: Adjust and Observe Interventions. Document. Mid-review (Assess) week 10 // Ideate + Prototype + Test: Rapid refinement of individual work based on mid-review Overview: During this section of the course, students will begin to build, model and prototype their design questions. These processes will likely require students to revisit their initial site findings and design questions. Simultaneously, students will meet collectively to critique and expand upon each other's individual research questions. The ideate and prototype phase will provide
Site Matters: Prototyping the Landscape Experiment Station further insights about how a collective Landscape Experiment Station may function. This will be explored via ongoing documentation on the cargo website. Deliverables: Collective: ongoing documentation on the cargo website, sketch design proposals for collective landlab, weekly group critique on individual projects Individual: hands on exploration of research topic through modeling, building and prototyping TEST AND ASSESS: Week 11-14 week 11 // Wrap up individual work. Develop individual deliverables. week 12 // Assess (individual work): Individual Project Presentation to Collective and Reviewers week 13 // Test (collective vision for LES): Design Synthesis week 14 // Assess (collective vision for LES): Complete work at the lab. Reflect. Plan for spring semester. Complete report. Overview: Students will install and record findings of their final research project. These findings will be presented to classmates and publicly on the cargo website. Collectively, the students will assess the overall experience of working onsite and present a general prototype for what the landlab could look like. The collective goal for Fall 2020 is to form a prototype that serves as a proposal for a long-term landscape lab with the potential to become a permanent curricular feature and research site for the UVA School of Architecture Deliverables: Collective: complete course website, landscape report of semester experience, group manifesto, resources to be shared with future landlab users Individual: final installation of research topic, presentation on semester work with findings
Site Matters: Prototyping the Landscape Experiment StationÂ
Site Matters: Prototyping the Landscape Experiment Station
Precedents and reading list Kofi Boone’s Preserving History through Design-Build studio at NC state: https://design.ncsu.edu/blog/2019/09/04/preserving-history-through-design-build/ Gustavsson, Roland. “The Landscape Laboratory Concept in Scandinavia,” n.d., 74. https://efuf2019.wordpress.com/plenary-presentations/landscape-and-forest-laboratories/ GLDL Forest Labs workshop https://www.gldl.org/forest-labs-workshop https://www.gldl.org/gldl-forest-labs-public-workshop https://www.gldl.org/gldl-experimental-forest Object-based Forest Mapping in Northern Minnesota https://umn.maps.arcgis.com/apps/Cascade/index.html?appid=386bf26b38584b1780b80daf5 8499c5d Yale Landscape Lab https://entrepreneurship.yale.edu/center/yale-landscape-lab Auburn Rural Studio http://ruralstudio.org/ Olin - Algorithmic Plant Communities https://olinlabs.com/plant-communities Alnarp Landscape Laboratory https://www.slu.se/en/research/research-excellence/research-infrastructure/laboratorier/the-aln arp-landscape-laboratory/ Thermodynamic Interactions-Architectural Exploration into Material, Physiological and Territorial Atmosphere Subnature_Architecture's_Other_Environments_----_(PART_ONE_ATMOSPHERES_DanknessSm okeGasExhaust) Karen Lutsky and Sean Burkholder, “Curious Methods,” Places Journal, May 2017. Accessed 14 Jul 2020. https://doi.org/10.22269/170523 Raxworthy, Julian. Overgrown : practices between landscape architecture & gardening