Photographic Annotation Observation

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

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.

Prototype – Measure

Site Inventory Diagrams

A few photographs that I took with Xue Yao and manipulated with Photoshop and Illustrator.

Vector Section Perspective

This section perspective consists of around 60 photos I took then stitched and blended together manually in photoshop. The section line was created using a topography map of the site in AutoCAD. It is meant to be a single, continouus representation of the transition from urban to rural environment along my chosen path of approximately 985ft.

Site Photosynths

My first attempt at using photosynths.

Vector Narrative Drawings

Yesterday I made a series of drawings that were meant to capture a change narrative about our site as I moved through it. I focused on obstacles to movement and how they change in nature as a person moves from a city scape to wilderness. At first obstacles are anomalies, seen well in advance and planned for with little thought. Most of your field of vision does not need to be at work in order to determine a path towards your destination. As you move away from this environment into dense wilderness, hesitation increases and the mind becomes fraught with limitations. The park, which is abandoned, is dense vegetation with the occasional man made path or structure. At first a path is a welcome reprieve to obstructions, but then becomes the opposite as it leads one directly to the camp of someone living in these woods.

Vector Obstruction Narrative