When investigating the complex cultural and environmental legacies of two centuries of urban landscape changes, traditional landscape architectural graphic methods prove inadequate. This is an ongoing creative project on the legacies of over two-hundred years of cultural and biophysical interplay within the site of contemporary Chinatown in Manhattan.
The ten-acre case study site has a largely unrecognized, yet highly significant place in American history, as it was once the notorious Five Points slum. The project entails a series of original hybrid maps that interpret the mostly invisible history of this site.
Water quality is arguably the strongest indicator of landscape health and land use in a watershed. A topic most apt for city planning, water quality is also a great source of leverage in urban design[1]. But including water quality in the urban design discourse is not without its challenges. The relationship of land use and water quality is not immediately perceptible, which can make this relationship vague if not totally unknown to the general public. Because of its scale and invisible characteristics, water quality is difficult to represent visually, making it an abstract concept for planning purposes. This project tests representational methods that can help make the relationships between water and land vivid and clear. Mapping and walking are used methodically in TRAVERSE to examine and compare the contemporary engineered courses of Amazon Creek to the creek’s historical meanders. This creek, Eugene, Oregon’s second largest waterway (the Willamette River being the largest), was, until less-than 60-years ago, a winding shallow creek that, along with associated wetlands, flooded seasonally each year. As was the case in many North American cities during the post war development explosion, the stream was diverted into concrete channels, and became a major conduit for the city’s storm water runoff. As with many urbanized waterways, the future of Amazon Creek continues to be threatened by renewed development pressures within urban growth boundary. My objective was to catalog the social and environmental context of this creek. I constructed an exhibit of map-based representations that shed light on the current and historical relationships between land use and water quality in this urban watershed. Kathryn Kuttis assisted me with the project.
[1]Joan Iverson Nassauer, “Design Leverage: How water quality can lead to quality of life”, public lecture, University of Oregon, 4.19.07
I braid sculptural forms into fields of tall grass. The work of braiding acts as a form of maintenance, contemplation and construction. Usually a solitary figure in the field, I’m bent over, weaving handfuls of grass together, my posture recalling that of a farmer at work.
Yet, in contrast to one raising crops or cultivating the land, this labor done in a prone position is not practical, but instead is a critical practice. The Braided Fields series problematizes the pastoral landscape aesthetic through braiding large swaths of tall grass in fields, as both a time based activity and a form of land art.
By layering a new aesthetic layer into an old one, the work highlights the tension between the idealized landscape and the realities of the work and maintenance it takes to make the place. Pastoralism is a common aesthetic that has had a deep influence on European and American landscape design for centuries. Its roots lie in ancient texts like Virgil’s Eclogues, where the pastoral is the serene joining of nature and art. In the pastoral landscape, one can be in nature, but safe from the dangers of the wilderness, wherein one is free, like an idyll shepherd, to create music, art and poetry.
Like French braids on a head, plaited grass form lines in the landscape that have variable height and width, which wind around each other in spirals and waves. The interplay of shadow and light sharpen the visual experience by providing different levels of contrast through the day. Once complete, the braid structures remain, changing not only through the day, but also into rigid, golden structures through the season.
Making-do refers to the personalized, culturally specific amendments created by people in precarious communities using inexpensive materials to adapt existing urban structures. Making-do is important to explore in our contemporary era of unprecedented migration rates and urban space homogenization because these makeshift solutions serve as practical responses to everyday matters, as forms of maintenance, and as potentially subversive acts of inventiveness, ownership, and “right to the city”
Combining theoretical reflection with creative practice, this hybrid seminar-studio explored the interrelations between landscape and fashion in our rapidly urbanizing, globalizing world. The course, co-taught with Christoph Lindner , focused on the design implications of conceptualizing landscape architecture and fashion design together, andpaid special attention to issues of inequality, aesthetics, materiality, embodiment, and ecology. In what ways do landscape architecture and fashion design connect across cultures of critical making? What are the links between fast fashion and slow landscape in an era of acceleration and waste? What can the study of landscape and fashion reveal about our relationship with place in a world increasingly marked by placelessness?
image by JSchmidt atlasobscura.com
