Zenzoa

I am a big fan of Rebar, an ‘art and design studio’ in San Francisco that was launched into fame by unleashing Park(ing) Day on the world. According to Blaine Merker, a partner at Rebar and last week’s guest lecturer, they pursue rapid iterations of urban design. They have all the wood and metal shop stuff they could want in-house, so they can keep the designing and making parts of the process tightly linked. Many of their projects have been temporary installations of trees, benches, curbs, etc., as a full-scale mock-up of a street or park re-design. In fact, that first park-in-a-parking-lot project that made their name synonymous with tactical urbanism was an installation project that turned into a rapid prototype for a new form of urban infrastructure. Now cities pay them to do this sort of thing, and meanwhile Park(ing) Day has inspired the more permanent parklets (which is where I first ran across Rebar, while putting together a precedent study on parklets for SvR Design).

Rapid prototyping seems like a severely underused tool for urban design and landscape architecture. On the one hand, modern construction methods allow for incredibly quick turnaround: we expect skyscrapers to be built in a handful of years, and then torn down again within half a century, while the cathedrals of yesteryear took generations to complete. On the other hand, ‘we live in the cities of the past’ (Merker), designed to accomodate outmoded means of transportation and daily activities. Rapid prototyping allows for modifications of the old infrastructure without leaping off the cliff with millions of dollars in steel and concrete.

The more permanent a thing, the more constrained it is – it must be, to meet long-term considerations. Parklets are more conventional compared to the wacky ideas and fanciful social situations that pop up during Park(ing) Day, but the very things that allow the freedom and fantasy of the latter make it difficult for them to withstand the test of time. Similarly, putting in some potted plants, coir rolls, and new paint can test and prove the potential for more pedestrian- and community-friendly streets quickly and cheaply, but it cannot replace the need for serious infrastructural investment. The two work hand-in-hand, with the rapid prototypes to test designs in the real world before making a full commitment.

I’ve been writing a lot lately about how virtual reality can be a tool for putting a design through the wringer, and tactical urbanism dovetails in nicely. Putting more, smaller steps between an idea and its expensive construction not only allows for iterative refinement, but for discovery. Park(ing) Day and parklets were not the intended consequence of that first little urban intervention. There could be whole swaths of human experience that we’re missing out on in our cities because the process we use for building them is rigid. Short-term programming possibilities are lost in the cracks as we consider only the activities that will endure as long as the infrastructure we make to support them. Rebar and tactical urbanism suggest that we could use a more flexible and agile building method that takes the quick turn-around we expect on the large scale (skyscrapers) and make it less extravagant, more accessible, and with more potential for emergent forms of socializing and urban living.

Discovery Green, Houston, Texas

Tuesday was our final thesis crit. I felt progressively more ill as the day went on, weakly giving my presentation when my turn finally came, second to last in the lineup, and then going straight home and collapsing. But I’m back on my feet, if not back up to full speed – more than ready to wrap up the semester.

The current topic in Principles of Practice class, programming, seems appropriate since it was a bit a contentious thread throughout Tuesday’s presentations. We don’t want to be prescriptive in what users can do in the spaces we design, and too often we describe this as a ‘lack of programming.’ But the critics rightfully challenge this notion: we need to define a range of activities and design landscapes that support them and embrace our role as designers of program as much as physical space.

I think these two sides are actually the same coin, and we’re just looking at a problem of definition. I’m not sure we’ve ever had ‘programming’ defined for us in class before – it’s just been thrown about until we pick up on its usage (like the godawful ‘tectonic’). For you non-landscape architects in the audience, ‘programming’ is the choreographing of activities: what are people supposed to be doing in the space? We can decide this first if we want, and let program generate the physical layout and material structure, using the landscape as a catalyst for social functions; or program can be an overlay on top of a landscape that primarily performs ecological, structural, memorial, or some other non-human-centered function.

Most of our studios have dealt with accommodating certain program elements, like farmer’s markets or a playground, which may be more or less embedded in our designs. They’re a list of boxes to check off. The more interesting programs are those we define for ourselves, but perhaps we didn’t think of these as ‘program’ as a result. For example, an early studio project of mine proposed an interactive wetland: the program was observation and interaction with functional nature, with the goal of educating people about their symbiotic relationship with nature without being didactic about it. If framed in the discourse on program, I might have said that I wasn’t programming the space, because I’m not telling people precisely how they can interact with the wetland. Yet I do have a specific goal in mind and a good idea of the range of possible activities that I want to encourage in order to achieve that goal. In the design, this translated into a series of platforms; some high and perforated for people who want to just watch from a safe and clean distance; and some low, subject to periodic flooding, for people who want to poke at reeds and frogs and stick their toes in the mud.

I believe we want to say free-form play and exploration are not program because programming was introduced to us students as constraints. We’re resisting the idea that the designer can mandate what users are able to do. But the truth is, any design will have its affordances: some activities will be encouraged and others discouraged by the structure and amenities. Blank canvases, those wide open plazas like Schouwburgplein Plaza, end up as dead spaces most of the time because they really only accomodate large group activities. They seem program-less, but they actually have one a very specific program that precludes all others.

Contrast this with the theory behind Project for Public Spaces, that the more specific activities you can pack into the same space better. This strategy can draw a diverse range of people and put them together, furthering a larger program of community development. PPS’s ideas were put to the test in Houston’s Discovery Green. Packed over 25 programmed spaces into a park less than 12 acres large, it was inserted into a downtown that no one wanted to visit – there were not existing communities, destinations, or things to do. Now, with multiple events hosted daily, millions of Houston residents visit the park every year. PPS consulted on the project early on, so Discovery Green is designed entirely to support social functions; and it’s so successful in placemaking endeavor that new businesses and residences are being developed nearby. By designing to program, Discovery Green seems to have single-handedly transformed downtown Houston into a people-friendly place.

Not every landscape needs to be a community center. But whatever the goal for a place, embracing programming and clearly defining what it means for our landscape – even if we define it at a more abstract level, like ‘engaging with nature through bodily movement’ (if I can take a crack at what the program might be for Mickey or Tyler’s thesis) – allows us to create specific designs that encourage these forms of interaction. When we imagine the narrative of someone visiting a landscape, that person is most directly participating in programming: the activities in and of the place. We should still leave room for novel, ad-hoc activities that riff on the programming theme, like the blank slots in a mad-lib; but if we forgo programming altogether, no one is going to come in and write the whole story for us.

Schouwburgplein Plaza, Rotterdam, Netherlands

Is there anything better than the combination of feminism and landscape architecture? I think not! The person to introduce me to this chocolate-and-peanut-butter intersection is also one of my favorite guest critics, Thaisa Way, a historian of landscape architecture in general and women’s role in the field in particular. And she also happens to be one of the talking heads in a documentary I saw last night on this very topic, Women in the Dirt.

One of the theories proposed in the film (and elaborated on in the lecture Thaisa gave a couple years ago) as to why women have been so important to the landscape profession is that gardening has long been the domain of women. Architecture, with its large, iconic, self-supporting structures, was associated with masculinity, while landscape, with its flowers and birds, was considered yielding and feminine. Thanks to the magical thinking of gendered dichotomies, it was therefore one of the few acceptable career options for young ladies at the turn of the century. RISD’s program, in fact, emerged from the first women’s landscape architecture program, the Lowthorpe School. As landscape architecture gained respect as a legitimate profession, however, it also became more dominated by men. Only one woman, Beatrix Jones Farrand, was counted amongst the founding members of the American Society of Landscape Architects – as awesome as it was for there to be any women involved. Still, I wonder if playing second-fiddle to architecture for so long is what has allowed landscape architecture to be relatively welcoming to women practitioners – and now both have a chance to shine.

The eponymous Women in the Dirt discuss some of their own struggles to be accepted as serious professionals, including Lehrer’s hiding from her coworkers the fact that she had children. But in my personal landscape architecture bubble, women positively dominate. Almost every firm I’ve made contact with in Seattle has at least one female principle or lead designer, including women-led dream-teams at GGN, Karen Kiest Landscape Architects, Swift Company, Nakano Associates, and more. And true to being Lowthorpe’s progeny, RISD has given me mentors like Scheri Fultineer, Lili Hermann, and Kaki Martin. Scheri has pointed out to me, though, that while female students outnumber their male counterparts in landscape architecture graduate programs, there are far fewer female deans at major schools or full partners at dominant firms.

Proving the gendered division between architecture and landscape architecture wrong, Women in the Dirt showed a range of project types. Isabelle Greene’s work, most traditional in being lush, twining, private gardens also has exquisite and ambitious pools that she designs and engineers. Pamela Palmer uses water features and hardscapes to highlight the surrounding natural environment, weaving calming spaces for people into native ecosystems that she constructs. And Andrea Cochran built a friggin’ pyramid.

Though the film tends to linger on private landscape projects for the elite, even such a person known for her public-space activism as Mia Lehrer defends private practice as a way to experiment with new ideas. As an exercise in aesthetics and built-in-the-real-world construction (as opposed to design competitions), I found these projects compelling examples of a complex and deep involvement with ecology and human experience, even when they weren’t playing to a wider public audience.

With the climate turning inside out and exploding, it seems that landscape architecture and its practice of systems-level thinking is getting attention. Now everyone is designing with and around natural systems and negotiating human interactions. No longer simply feats of engineering, our cities and suburbs and rural places are made functional, sustainable, and beautiful by constructing living ecosystems on top of engineered topographies, structural soils, and space-age materials… and crafting a shifting emotional and physiological experience on top of that. This requires more than ‘masculine’ calculations or ‘feminine’ garden puttering. Just as you can’t draw a hard line between building and landscape – or even attempt to define it as a simple two-dimensional spectrum – there is no essential division between men, women, or any other gender.

What follows is a hypothetical public art project proposal for Cambridge, MA.

This is a project that aims to blur the boundaries between real and virtual worlds. The plan is to create large, public portals into a digital realm through the physical urban environment. The digital world is projected onto the sides of buildings in Cambridge, creating real-world access points where the virtual world can be explored and modified by anyone (not just gamers and geeks). It is a parallel universe that begins as a virtual copy of Cambridge, but over the course of the event – a long weekend – as the public gets their hands on the immense creative power afforded by the digital environment, the virtual universe will change in unpredictable and fantastic ways. The fact that this takes place in public, not on private computer screens, means players and observers can use this interactive public art project as a catalyst for conversations about possibilities in the real world. What happens when the power to shape the world is given out freely to anyone and everyone? … when the very structural fabric of our city is collectivized? … when legalities and practicalities are stripped away? What do we envision our city to be?

The virtual world lives in Minecraft, a three-dimensional LEGO-like game in which players can build almost anything they can imagine. It runs on a single server, connected to by several computers set up in public places around Cambridge. Each computer is hooked up to a projector, using a building facade as the screen with which to view the Minecraft game world. This way the alternate reality becomes part of this reality by being drawn on physical structures. All the computers are accessing the same world, but they provide different views into that world so that several people can act in it simultaneously. For the duration of the project, a volunteer monitor is on hand at each location to make sure the equipment is safe, to help people understand how to interact with the virtual world, and to make sure no one bogarts the controls or ravage virtual Cambridge.

Word of the upcoming event will be spread through blogs and twitter feeds, both Cambridge- and Minecraft-themed, with posters hung at college campuses, community message boards, and MBTA stations. Part of the funding will hopefully come from a Cambridge Arts Council grant, but to afford the rental of projectors, computers, and other equipment, a Kickstarter campaign will provide supplemental funds. All of this requires a graphic identity for the project to be used in social media, posters, and t-shirts – which can be worn by monitors and act as gifts for Kickstarter backers. During the event itself, participants get stickers or buttons to display proudly and share with friends, and the project’s online presence (probably a Facebook page) will share images taken in the virtual Cambridge to show interesting features and reveal the place’s evolution over time. The goal is to get people excited about creative power and engage the public in collectively imagined spaces.

West 8 is a landscape architecture unicorn. They show off massively large-scale projects detailed down to the last lamp posts with ambitious programming and design in between, all of which looks like speculative competition entry for something about the ‘future of parks.’ Then they tell you they’re halfway done building it. Take Governor’s Island, for example.

Claire Agre, from West 8′s New York office, talked about one of their projects that is currently speculative. At least, until the bureaucracy is cleared away. Yongsan Park is a proposal for transforming a forbidden military base in the heart of Sol, Korea into a living landscape painting. To connect with the site’s past and tie together its different corners, they propose creating these stone platforms called madangs on the footprints of some of the old buildings.

Though the material and conceptual language is the same, each madang is suited to its local conditions. Whether a perch, a place to say your wedding vows, part of a water feature… the shape and position of the madang changes to adapt to programming needs.

This adaptive strategy makes the madang more than a hunk of stone. Drawing it in plan or section won’t help you understand it – you have to understand it in context, and in series with the other madangs. I can imagine these being placed in an existing nature preserve or national park, minimal interventions to take advantage of exceptional views, provide respite after difficult hikes, or guide people without needing a trail by using them as landmarks.

My own thesis project works similarly. I’ve chosen a very limited material palette – copper sheeting – and now I’m figuring out how to embed it in downtown Seattle in ways that capture and transform light and water in interesting ways. Rather than doing something inherently interesting with the copper – in other words, I’m not aiming for sculpture – I’m trying as much as possible to divert attention away from what I’m doing and towards the transformations it’s causing.

It’s tricky when I find myself working with piles of scratched and bent pieces of metal that are as far from cool as can be. I have to work out the implications of those scratches and bends for the place that they’re in before their potential is revealed.

Another good example of this technique is Vogt’s Weather Garden in Zurich. A grid of stone slabs, subtly shaped to pool water, act as pixels in an animation of reflection and evaporation. The sequence of rain and then no rain, leaving still puddles, and then sun, leaving bare rock, creates an ever-changing work of art. The artist, however, is more Nature than Vogt – Vogt only made the canvas.

My thanks to Subway Nut and Ben Haley for their photographs, which I used as bases for my renderings, with permission and under a Creative Commons license respectively.