Yesterday a friend and I were talking about his career plans. He’s a horticulturist, and has been grappling with the decision whether or not to go back to school to study landscape architecture. If he were to get a job in horticulture instead, and take classes on the side, he thought he might like to do graphic or web design, with an eye toward learning compositional principles that he might then apply to landscape design.
A red flag flickered in my mind’s eye when he mentioned that idea. Certainly, moving from graphic design to landscape architecture has been done before — Martha Schwartz is the most immediate example I can think of. But my sense is that the transition is still a demanding one, and not everyone is successful at developing a three-dimensional sense of place from a background that relies on the manipulation of two-dimensional products.
Landscape architecture uses two dimensional forms of expression — the drawn plan, elevation, section, and perspective — to depict what will become three-dimensional reality. The demanding part of landscape architecture requires the designer to conceive of the proposed place in three dimensions before expressing it two. The design concept has a three-dimensional reality in the designer’s imagination before it ever makes it onto a page. In graphic design, though, the concept usually only ever needs the complexity of two-dimensions.
A landscape developed from a graphic composition can work, certainly. Shapes can be popped up into volumes, ground plane can be carved, pushed, or pulled to create form, and space can be defined with any number and type of materials. The big trick is to create a place that feels like a place to be in, and not simply like a ticktacktoe board, or a pattern on the ground that you only look at.
Am I putting too much emphasis on the three-dimensional idea? I wrestle with this idea — I do think that volumetric form is usually more complex and satisfying than two-dimensional shape as a landscape construct, but wonder if my education has created a bias toward that form. Then I think about my aim as a landscape architect — to create places for people to move in and through, places that remind them of their humanness as well as their connection to the earth and the air around them — and remind myself that this aim requires a complex approach. What’s more, I remember that the fourth dimension, time, plays a huge role in the life of a landscape (at least a planted one), and that I have to take the volumetric approach to conceiving places, and envision them as they grow and evolve.
So — here’s the tiny start of a discussion about landscape architecture, and the hope that this website will itself grow and evolve into a rich landscape of thought about the field.
Deborah Howe
Toby Wolf
Speaking as a web developer (and thus designer by default), I completely agree with you. The site is always static unless I make changes to it. And there are many tricks we employ to make it look a certain way that would never work if we had to deal with 3D. (Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.)
“Landscape architecture uses two dimensional forms of expression — the drawn plan, elevation, section, and perspective — to depict what will become three-dimensional reality.”
As a student, I have started wrestling with this issue already. As you stated, we look to create a 3D (maybe 4D) spatial experience but yet the overarching, dominant practice is to express that experience in 2D. Obviously – expressing a 3D space in 2D (that is in a combination of plan and section) is possible – but is it effective? Does it communicate well?
I personally don’t believe so. Sure, it does communicate on a certain, basic level – but thats mainly to other designers who are familiar with plan & section drawings. They can easily extrapolate whats on the plan mentally and develop a rough idea of what the space will look like. However – show that same plan to an ordinary citizen or client – and they have (for the most part) no idea whats going on because they always experience space in 3D (or 4D) and have a difficult time reading a 2D plan or section.
With that said, I am very interested in developing a new drawing technique that bridges the gap between plan & section – creating a drawing that better communicates and illustrates (graphically) interspatial relationships.
*by 4D I refer to the idea of “Time” as well as user’s mental cognitive maps that they use to move through spaces and travel.
Swisschez, thanks for your good comment. I would say that we almost always look to create a 4-dimensional experience — because organic materials (plants, water, soil, wood, stone) are usually a part of our design we have to take time into account in considering what our site’s visitors will be seeing at any given point. A new drawing technique would likely use some kind of progression to illustrate what we’re talking about, something these days done with video or stop-action photography or animated 3-D modeling.
One important thing to keep in mind: those 2D drawings actually are extremely valuable. They may be less so in communicating to a client what a place will look like, but they’re essential for us to communicate with contractors how we want things to be built. Once you get into doing construction drawings you’ll see that without 2D drawings to express at least the layout of a design, your contractor is pretty much at sea in figuring out exactly what you want. Sometimes you can wave your arms and talk the contractor through your design, but that only works if precision isn’t important and if you and your contractor know each other and trust each other’s sensibility and approach pretty thoroughly. Contractors won’t necessarily want that degree of flexibility, though, because it will make the limits of their liability less clear. For the same reason, you will find yourself usually doing construction drawings to express both what you how you want your design built and to establish the limits of your liability.
To show clients, the public, or the contractor what a design will look like, stationary perspectives or their animated equivalents are invaluable. To show the precise dimensions, details, and particulars of a design so it can be built exactly as you want it, 2D drawings are still the very best tool possible, as they provide a common language between you and your contractor.