Project 2.002

I learned this

Iteration Model Flooding/Draining

Here is a video Audrey and I made to show what would happen when a clay model, representing our initial design proposal for Desoto Park, was flooded and then drained. Feel free to skip around to the action.

Photographic Annotation Observation

This weeks site observation: Use only photographs to express some of the same ideas that were expressed through annotation last week.

River Control Structures

Here is a presentation I gave on Mississippi River control systems/structures. I also wrote a research paper to go along with it. The idea behind this research is to understand the dynamism of the river and all of the things that should be understood about it when designing a landscape that will interact with it on a day to day basis. The presentation format is in a web application called “prezi”. Similar to powerpoint it lets you use a large board that zooms in and out on specific frames that you put into a linear order. At any point you can manipulate the board to pause, go back or move around to another area. In this case it was accompanied with a verbal presentation.

Micro-Landscape Update(s)

My two grasses have both run their course. The life span for such grasses is only a couple of weeks, but mine seemed to almost last an entire month. The grass that grew the fastest and highest, which was around the disturbance wall, died the first. My theory for why the grass grew best there was that the wood was soaking up the sporadic watering and keeping the surrounding area moist for a longer period than the areas that drained and became drier quicker.

I’ve waited a few days for the grass to become brittle and break down, so that I can get in and reseed with some herbs. I am going to plant three distinct and separate areas. One at the top of the planter edge. One at the bottom of the swale and one right at the spot where the grass grew the highest. I plan to catalog their growth in the same way that I did with the grass.

Planter as it looks today

Planter as it looked one week ago

 

Annotate Site Observation

By observing change over a brief period of time, one is forced to use analysis and imagination to understand what future conditions on the site will be like. Any piece of design, but especially those of landscapes, are not frozen in time upon completion. What you design and construct will take on a completely different experience and meaning as days, months, seasons and years pass. Desoto is definitely a landscape in flux and any observations or design decisions must account for both the minor and major changes that will occur there.

This exercise began the process of listing those changes, by making note of what was happening there upon arrival and then documenting the quick, gradual and long term changes that stood out to me or I speculated would happen.

The outer ring of annotations contain observations that happened when I first arrived. The inner ring is for elements that changed or I thought would change. The annotations aren connected to the two rings by three color coded leader lines. Yellow being a connection to the present or future as having sudden change potential, green having gradual change potential and orange as long term change potential.

Birthday Inspiration

This is a drawing that Xue Yao made me for my birthday. One day I hope to be able to draw this well. I think it is a valuable skill to be able to quickly translate something in your minds eye to a medium which anyone can quickly understand.

Girl in the snow

Desoto Proposals

Design Process pt. 2

One of the most significant challenges I have faced, and continue to face, in a heavily design oriented graduate school program is being able to distill my reviews down to what I believe is valuable feedback. There is so much work to be completed and so little time to have it evaluated, that the brief time I do get in front of an audience, who have a wide range of knowledge of the assignment and goals I was aiming to achieve, often leaves me frustrated (see previous post). I know that the review/critique process has value. If you can’t explain your design process and proposal to someone and be able to hear what they think, and in turn want, how will you ever survive in a client oriented industry with something as indefinable as successful landscape design? That’s one reason why I believe the review process has instructional merit. The other is that assignments and objectives truly never seem clearer to me than the instant a group of people start having synergy about what they think were the strengths and “missed opportunities” in my proposals. However, with that fleeting bit of clarity comes a fair dose of opinion that is little more than an explanation of individual taste, as opposed to an offering about the universal truths of design process, presentation and theory. The problem is that opinion (taste) and suggestions on honing ones design technique are talked about in the exact same manner, same sentence and are sometimes confused with one another as being instructional.

Another problem is that reviewers, who I think generally air on the side of negativity for the safety it affords, often bring their own failures or successes with them to the table. More often than not, something I have created reminds them of something they like or dislike rather than being a proposal of something completely new and autonomous. This makes it difficult for me to see past who they are as designers to who I am as one. If we can’t all design towards the same right answer because we are all inhernetly different in nature and there is no right answer, then what exactly am I hoping to get out of these peoples comments? I know it’s in there somewhere, but I need a better grasp on it.

My intention here is not to make a sweeping judgement on the state of the review process, but to try to summarize the difficulties I’m experiencing with it. What can I do to further gain from this practice that is so heavily integrated into my curriculum and counts towards my evaluation?

So, this experiment may have trouble getting off the ground, but I would like to open a quick discussion to my classmates (you can reply here or post something on your own blog) as to what single piece of information offered or idea born was most valuable to you in the last review. Preferebly it’s not a direct quote from one of the faculty sitting in or something taken from the project evaluation, but just a comment on what glaring opportunity you think you missed, what purpose you will bring with you to the next project or how you think you have evolved as a designer in the last few weeks.

I’ll start with my own:

I wish I would have had one single diagram from beginning to finish that adapted to my preference for more geometrical forms and I wish I could have preempted some comments on how I ended up doing this or that unfortunate thing with major program elements by explaining how I actually meant to do them because they made sense for reasons x, y and z (and of course in my opinion, were in great taste).

Design Process

One way to look at it