Landscape Architecture: CoLAB: The Nature of Sand

The Nature of Sand Reuben Hore-Waterhouse Masters of Landscape Architecture Melbourne, Australia

The Nature of Sand

In understanding these dynamic relationships and processes, it is impossible to view landscape as static. It is the aggregation of moments, a provisional state of matter on its way to becoming something else entirely (Corner, 2012), an interaction between systems and their assemblage into (temporal) coherences.

The system will stay in equilibrium, until another threshold within the system’s dynamic is crossed. (Kwinter, 1992). By understanding the behaviours, traits and relationships of these forces; ecologists and equally landscape architects can make predictions and generalizations about system outcomes.

Here it becomes imperative to understand how the relationship and behaviour between sediment and external flows react. It can determine how the sediment forms as a collective and their patterns of transition from one state into another. A knowledge that can be used to determine how the sediment might form in future events.

creating scripts for both understanding and influencing a larger performance. They see the script in its entirety, with all actors and agents of change working along one timeline. They picks where to intervene and mutate its course. The choreographer is responsive, understanding cycles and intrinsic forces of a given script (wind, water current), as well as understanding site as not a bounded territory but as a constantly shifting flux within space and time, becoming a stage to which new actors enter and leave the performance. The choreographer identifies the key actors that have a pivotal effect on the environment and start to leverage that.

This new model of practice not only extends the knowledge to which to design, but must invent new ways to draw and test within in such a dynamic ecological system.

Peter Eisenman The grid represents a tool for organising and interpreting information within space.

It allows for the abstraction of movement and form into its most basic of understanding.

DRAWING METHODS

Grid

Node

Nodal Transit / Redistribution

Drawing Conventions - Exploration of the Grid

The Grid provides a unit of measure. A tool used to represent a static moment in time- it is scalable and infinite.

It is volumetric - enables the encapsulation and division of material in space. It is a tool to which change overtime can be measured from.

The Node is a datum point assigned to a singular granule.

It enables the visualisation of transit material in space and time from previously recorded coordinates.

Current 1

Current 2

3

1

2

4

5

8

9

2

1

1 6

7

2

4

3

5 3 10

11

12

7

4 6 5 8

6

11

10 13

14

15 7

1wk

9

13

1

12

8 10

9

11

16

17

14 16

18

13

12

15

14 19

20

18 15

16

1

17 19

21

20

1

17

21 18

22

22

19

20

11wk 21

Granule Node Recording 22

The Nature of Sand Granule Node

Sediment becomes a material subject to transit; its movement and form building is responsive to the forces and the obstruction around it. It is almost weightless singularly but is formative and potential as a collective.

It is never destroyed, just exchanged and reformed temporarily.

27wk

A

A

B

B

C

C S. N

S. N

S. N

S. N

START NODE

S. N

Water Node

Direction Extent of Flow

Tidal Movement Granule Node

A cycle pattern of water flow. It is particular in its duration, with an inward and outward movement, a taking away and depositing. It is responsible for the constant re-territorialisation between land and sea.

Equilibrium

Obstruction

Obstruction Granule Node

An obstructing form is a node for forceful change.

Sediment and current are responsive, eager to find a flow of equilibrium in its new scenario. As a side effect they behave differently - gather and flow with various intensities and shift and manipulate sediment in differing formations.

Wind Direction

Material Node

Wind Current Granule Node

Wind is fluid in its motion, shapes and moved by the spacial form of the environment around it. It congregates, merges, splits, collides and disperses. It is an agent for moving material.

RMIT University School of Architecture & Design Masters of Landscape Architecture CoLAB (Masters Thesis Project) 2017 Submitted by: Reuben Hore-Waterhouse