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In times where the very concept of ‘nature’ is questioned not only in its philosophical dimension, but in the core of its biological materiality, we need to reconsider the interrelations between architecture and nature.
discipline of landscape architecture. Authors Cantrell and Holzman predict an emerging paradigm shift—where biology, intelligent machines, and systems will begin to productively coexist and co-evolve.”
and I exaggerated the step overage to reveal the contour lines so I could have something to show how the material was working against that concept. I made a plaster mold of it because I learned about this as I was doing a lot of ceramic slip casts which is how a lot of manufacturing of ceramics occur. It’s been around for a long time. The plaster absorbs the water of the liquid clay out of the slip and creates a shell around where it touches the plaster and then you could pour out the liquid state that remains inside. However long you leave it in the mold, the thicker the walls get. Through these interactions, I was amazed to really produce something that had the appearance of an unknown landscape, perhaps a moonscape—something otherworldly. Nevertheless, it had the kind of complexity that I was interested in. Zooming in—you can see all the interaction that took place before the firing and after the firing. The firing, to me, was a metaphor for a dynamic landscape process—the water moving across the landscape or perhaps the introduction of chemical and physical processes. For me, this work illustrates the ability for materials to instigate and record change. I think that Skylar, in his lecture, created a great argument for the 33
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ability of material properties to be active agents in design.
RESPONSIVE LANDSCAPES I’m now going to step into some work that I’ve done with Bradley Cantrell (Professor of Landscape Architecture), whom I worked with at LSU and Harvard GSD. After teaching together and developing some related work, we began working on our recently published manuscript, Responsive Landscapes: Strategies for Responsive Technologies in Landscape Architecture, to build a framework and discuss a series of case studies that position the role and potential of responsive technologies in landscape architecture. Generally, I would say that we are much more familiar with the use of responsive technologies in architecture as opposed to landscape architecture in their ability to mediate public and private space with an amount of flexibility, but not necessarily with any adaptive or transformative capacity. We were lucky to get a foreword by Jason Kelly Johnson and Nataly Gattegno of Future Cities Lab, their description follows: “Responsive Landscapes engages a latent territory that, to date, has remained largely underexplored within the
Landscape architecture really has seen a paradigm shift in the last two decades that has required designers to respond to the kind of dynamic and temporal changes that are occurring. We’re really interested in how you can combine this shift with increasing excessive ability of responsive technology particularly in the maker-culture of our time. I really want to highlight this quote by Carole Collet where she says “In times where the very concept of ‘nature’ is questioned not only in its philosophical dimension, but in the core of its biological materiality, we need to reconsider the interrelations between architecture and nature.” There’s really an opportunity, I would say, to use technology as a mediator. With that comes, a lot of testing, experimentation, and working with for instance robotics like Arduino to think about, as Lucy Bullivant says, “the technologies involved, of sensing, computation and display, are in rapid flux, so anachronistic solutions need to be robust; breakdowns are an occupational and institutional hazard, and new schemes are not foolproof … designers are extending the versatility of equipment for crafted responsive environments to enable different sensing modalities. The difference is that they customize what exists in order to achieve the right results.” Perhaps the most important aspect of working with responsive technologies is the feedback
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loop—created by our ability to sense and monitor the landscape (or some other phenomenon), process that information, and then respond with adjustments in a way that is dynamic. And that, I would say, is a really fundamental concept—in landscape architecture we are always adjusting to our changing environment. With that introduction, we used the following chapters to create a framework of six different methodologies for how you might approach responsive technologies in a way that is specific to the discipline of landscape architecture. I will quickly go through the six methods and a few of the case studies to provide some context. We were really lucky to have a great selection of built, temporary, and speculative case studies as well as several interviews that are a bit more projective about the work of some of the contributors.
ELUCIDATE The first methodology, elucidate portrays and brings clarity to ordinarily unseen and invisible phenomenon through methods of visualization of the most basic level. Most projects exhibiting responsive technologies share this component, however, projects within this category really draw specific attention to interpreting and visualizing imperceptible phenomena. In this example, things you can’t see, like the energy of wind, elucidated across a temporary installation of 500 wind-powered lanterns composed as an exterior screen on the facade of Building 54 on MIT’s campus by Höweler + Yoon Architecture. Or in the case of Nuage Vert, translated as “Green Cloud”, a temporary installation elucidates the
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