LA 7103 . Landscape Media III: Narration, Temporal, and Generative Tools

Ecolibrium Perspective WaterHyacinthHarvesting

Landscape Architecture 7103, Fall 2013

COAD 301, Tuesday 1.30-4.30pm

Bradley Cantrell, Associate Professor

[email protected], office hours Th 10 am – 11.30 am, COAD 302

 

Overview

The tools we use to illustrate, explore, and test our design ideas are central to our profession and must have a discrete connection to our methods (construction, planning, management) in the built environment. Landscape Media III seeks to examine the heuristic relationship between representational artifacts and design iteration. Through a study of the methods in which representation and prototyping are understood, conveyed, and graphically communicated, the course builds upon topics covered in Tools I and II as techniques defining an expanded field of representational strategies. This expanded field of strategies will embrace new media, film, science, simulation, and computation as tools essential to the understanding of contemporary modes of practice. The course will rely on known techniques explored in your previous tools courses and ask for you to place nascent techniques and case studies in the context of contemporary media requiring fluid transitions between multiple methodologies.

The course is organized into three themes that will frame the course term project: narrative, temporal, generative.

1.00 Narrative . This explores landscape representation as a mode of storytelling. It will be necessary to frame a cohesive and clear thesis that is evident through the visual methods.

2.00 Temporal . Time will be explored as an expression of dynamic landscape processes. Seasonal, hydrological, and/or evolutionary processes may be deconstructed to understand the intricacies of time based systems.

3.00 Generative . At the heart of representational methods is the need to generate new intelligence, relationships, and technologies. Through parametric methods this project will examine tools to generate surfaces and terrains.

Each theme will frame landscape representation through a well-defined lens that will extract methods of image making, technical illustration, simulation, and animation in order to explore landscape as a composite series of processes.

 

Course Structure

Each week the course themes will be presented through lectures, technique demonstrations, and pin-ups to discuss ongoing work. It is expected that significant progress on assigned projects occurs between meetings, approximately 6hrs outside of meeting times will need to be dedicated to your projects each week. The coursework is cumalitive and will be used to develop a significant term project that utilizes multiple modes of representation and modeling.

The three themed projects (projects 1.00, 2.00, and 3.00) will include two phases, product and documentation. The product will be the exploration of multiple techniques within the boundaries of the current theme. In the documentation phase it will be necessary to not only explore the tools in each project but to also trace the lineage of the known techniques and document the current application in landscape architecture. This documentation phase will capture the technique’s history, method, and application.

 

Course Protocols

Because of the volatility of digital media it is important that you keep a backup of your work in a safe place at all times. It is recommended that you keep a live copy on your local hard drive as well as a backup on CD/DVD Rom, external hard drive, flash drive. Never use a flash drive as the only place to store your data, a jump drive is a device to transfer information from one hard drive to an other and should be used accordingly. Losing your information because of a computer failure is NOT an excuse for turning in a late project.

It is your responsibility to make sure you have access to the CADGIS server and the shared space available there. All assignments will be delivered to the server and collateral material will be available there.

Attendance is mandatory for the scheduled duration of the studio sessions (Tuesday 1:30-4:30). More than three unexcused absences may constitute grounds to drop you from the course (see Attendance Regulations in the LSU General Catalog). Since most class meetings or general discussions will take place at the beginning of the class period it is important that all students should be in the classroom promptly at 1:30. Arriving late or leaving early, unless authorized by the instructor, will be considered an unexcused absence.

Each student’s final grade will be determined by the student’s progress and final product of each project. This includes the quality of interaction, production, craft, content, and presentation of the student’s work. Students must engage in active discussions regarding the progress of their work. Projects will not be accepted that haven’t been reviewed by the instructor. Late and incomplete work will not be accepted unless the student has a valid excused absence. Students will be expected to participate in all class/online discussions, field trips, and reviews. Participation is critical for your progress in studio and is therefore required.

 

Grading Breakdown

15% 1.00 Narrative
15% 2.00 Temporal
15% 3.00 Generative
20% 4.00 Composite
25% 00.1 Techniques and Documentation
10% Engagement

 

Computing Requirements

The following must be brought to every class session to fully participate in the software demonstrations. The required software should be installed and running by the September 10th.

Hardware (required)

  • Laptop Computer with discrete video and 8gb of RAM

  • Windows 7 or later running natively on hardware (not through Parallels, Vmware, etc)

  • Mouse

Software (required)

Adobe CS 5.5 or later (Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects)

AutoCAD 2010 or later

ArcGIS 10.1 or later

Rhino 5.0 and Grasshopper

3ds max 2013 or later

Software (plugins, etc.)

Aquaveo (ArcGIS and Standalone)

Populate 3d, Panels and Terrain (3ds max)

Forest Lite (3ds max)

Grasshopper 3d (Rhino)

Kangaroo (Rhino)

Firefly (Rhino)

  Composite Model

Schedule

0.1 August 27th . Week 1 . Course Introduction and Project 1.00 Overview

 

reading

Corner, James. “Representation and Landscape” in Theory in Landscape Architecture: A Reader, ed. Simon Swaffield. reprint of James Corner, “Representation and Landscape: Drawing and Making in the Landscape Medium,” Word & Image. Vol 8 no 3. pp 243-275.

 

1.0 September 3rd . Week 2 . Research and Site Visits

 

reading

Lynch, Kevin. “The City Image and its Elements” in The Image of the City. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960.  46-90

Gilles Deleuze’s ideas on non-Euclidean narrative: a step towards fractal narrative

 

1.1 September 10th . Week 3 . Landscape as Image

 

reading

Treib, Marc. “Photographic Landscapes: Time Stilled, Place Transposed” in Representing Landscape Architecture, ed. Marc Treib. London: Taylor & Francis, 2008.

 

1.2 September 17th . Week 4 . Diagram and Annotation

 

reading

Allen, Stan. “Field Conditions,” in Points and Lines: Diagrams and Projects For The City. New York : Princeton Architectural Press, 1999.

 

Cosgrove, Denis. “Carto-City” in Else/Where: Mapping New Cartographies of Networks and Territories, ed. Janet Abrams and Peter Hall. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Design Institute, 2006. 148-157

 

1.3 September 24th . Week 5 . Project 1.00 Review, Project 2.00 Overview

 

reading

Pallasmaa, Juhani. “Space, Place, Memory, and Imagination: The Temporal Dimension of Existenial Space.” in Spatial Recall: Memory in Architecture and Landscape, ed. Marc Treib: Routledge, 2009

 

2.0 October 1st . Week 6 . Animated Landscapes

 

reading

Girot, Christophe. “Vision in Motion: Representing Landscape in Time” in The Landscape Urbanism Reader, ed. Charles Waldheim. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006.

 

2.1 October 8th . Week 7 . Landscape Processes

 

reading

Halprin, Lawrence. The RSVP Cycles: Creative Processes in the Human Environment. NYC: G. Brazilier, 1970.

 

2.2 October 15th . Week 8 . Simulating Processes

 

reading

Robert Cook, “Do Landscapes Learn? Ecology’s New Paradigm and Design in Landscape Architecture” Ian McHarg Lecture at the University of Pennsylvania. 1999.

 

2.3 October 22nd . Week 9 . Project 2.00 Review, Project 3.00 Overview

 

reading

Kolarevic, Branko. “Digital Morphogenesis” in Architecture in the Digital Age.

 

3.0 October 29th . Week 10 . Parametric and Generative Terrains

 

reading

Kolarevic, Branko. “Digital Production” in Architecture in the Digital Age, ed. Branko Kolarevic. New York: Spoon Press, 2003.

 

3.1 November 5th . Week 11 . Parametric and Generative Methods

 

reading

Steven Johnson. “Listening to Feedback. ”Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. New York: Scribner. 2001. 130-162.

 

3.2 November 12th . Week 12 . Project 3.00 Review and Project 4.00 Overview

 

reading

Waldheim, Charles. “Aerial Representation and the Recovery of Landscape” in “Recovering Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture, ed. James Corner. NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999.

 

4.0 November 19th . Week 13 . Storyboard and Documentation Concept Due

 

4.1 November 26th . Week 14 . Studio Review Week

 

4.2 December 3rd . Week 15 . Project 4.00 Pin-up

 

4.3 December 10th . Week 16 . Project 4.00 Review

 

Course Resources

Representation Techniques

Mertens, Elke. Visualizing Landscape Architecture. Basel: Birkhauser, 2009.

Sullivan, Chip. Drawing the Landscape. Wiley, 2004.

Steenbergen, Clemens. Composing Landscapes: Analysis, Typology, and Experiments for Design. Basel: Birkhauser, 2008.

Dee, Catherine. Form and Fabric in Landscape Architecture. London: Taylor & Francis, 2001.

Amoroso, Nadia. Representing Landscapes: A Visual Collection of Landscape Architectural Drawings. London: Routledge, 2012.

Cantrell, Bradley and Wes Michaels. Digital Drawing for Landscape Architecture: Contemporary Techniques and Tools for Digital Representation in Site Design. Wiley, 2010.

Cantrell, Bradley and Yates, Natalie. Modeling the Environment: Techniques and Tools for the 3D Illustration of Dynamic Landscapes. Wiley, 2011.

 

Theory

Treib, Marc, ed. Representing Landscape Architecture. London: Taylor & Francis, 2008

Cook, Peter. Drawing: The Motive Force of Architecture. Wiley, 2008.

Garcia, Mark, ed. AD Reader: The Diagrams of Architecture. Wiley, 2010.

 

Diagramming, Mapping, and Information Visualization

Abrams, Janet and Peter Hall. Else/where: Mapping new cartographies of networks and territories. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Design Institute, 2006.

Bertin, Jacques. The Semiology of Graphics: Diagrams, Networks, Maps. ESRI Press, 2010.

Harmon, Katharine. You Are Here: Personal geographies and other maps of the imagination. New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004.

Harmon, Katharine with essays by Gayle Clemans. The Map as Art: Contemporary artists explore cartography. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2009.

McCandless, David. The Visual Miscellaneum: A Colorful Guide to the World’s Most Inconsequential Trivia. Harper Design, 2009.

Mogel, Lize and Alexis Bhagat. An Atlas of Radical Cartography. Los Angeles: Journal of Aesthetics and Protest Press, 2007.

Klanten, Robert, ed. Data Flow: Visualizing Information in Graphic Design. Die Gestalten Verlag, 2008.

Klanten, Robert, ed. Data Flow 2: Visualizing Information in Graphic Design. Die Gestalten Verlag, 2010.

Lima, Manuel. Visual Complexity: Mapping patterns of information. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2011.

Silver, Mike and Diana Balmori. Mapping in the Age of Digital Media: The Yale Symposium. London: Wiley-Academy, 2003.

Steele, Julia and Noah Ilinsky. Beautiful Visualization: Looking at Data Through the Eyes of Experts. O’Reilly Media, 2010.

Tufte, Edward R. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd Edition. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 2001.

Tufte, Edward R. Envisioning Information. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 1990.

Tufte, Edward R. Visual Explanations. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 1997.

Tufte, Edward R. Beautiful Evidence. Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 2006.

Yau, Nathan. Visualize This: The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics. Wiley, 2011.

 

Visualizing Ecological Process

Dramstad, W., J. D. Olson, and R. T. T. Forman. Landscape Ecology Principles in Landscape Architecture and Land-Use Planning. Washington, DC: Island Press, 1996.

McHarg, Ian. Design with Nature. New York: Wiley, 1995 (Originally Published Garden City, NY: Museum of Natural History, 1969).

 

Digital Fabrication

Kolarevic, Branko. Architecture in the Digital Age: Design and Manufacturing. Routledge: 2005.

Meredith, Michael, ARUP AGU, Mutsuro Sasaki, P.ART (AKT), designtoproduction, Aranda/Lasch, et al. From Control to Design: Parametric/Algorithmic Architecture. Barcelona: Actar, 2008.

Iwamoto, Lisa. Digital Fabrications. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2009.

Foreign Office Architects. Phylogenesis: FOA’s Ark. Barcelona: Actar, 2004.

 

reading list and resources partially compiled from GSD 2241 Fall 2012, Hansen and Cantrell