Peter Walker

Peter Walker (Image taken from google images)

An landscape architect with an international reputation for his work from small scale work gardens to large scale urban city plazas. His approaches to landscape designs are minimal been inspired by minimal  art believing it has an unique expression as well as inherent inspiration from the past from Zen Gardens, Geek Temples and also Renaissance. As well as approaching designs in an artist mind, Peter Walkers  analysis the relationships and approaches designs with diversity of geographic contexts and cultural contexts.

''Peter Walker: ''Landscape as Art'' : by Process Architecture - An great book to read if your interested or inspired by Peter Walker and his landscape architecture.

Here I will like to share an interview/conversation between Peter Walker and Yoji Sasaki, which did get me thinking and to understand Peter Walkers approaches to designs in his own style and how he separates - Art from Design - Design from Art or -  or How both relates to each other.

A conversation with Peter Walker Yoji Sasaki (page 25) 

Yoji Sasaki: Then What is the difference between art and design?

 

Peter Walker: The main difference between art and design is function. Design MUST function. Art MAY function. When design ceases to function, it can only be considered as art. When design DOES function, it can be considered as art AND design. Now, a building or a garden must in some manner be enter able. Therefore, even if you're going in only mentally, it has to be spatial. At the simplest level, the viewing gardens are functional. They function as elements of religious ceremony - of contemplation, if you will.

''a sculptor or a painter have a signature, or some obvious way of making his work recognisable. It's very difficult, but not impossible, for landscape architect to have a signature. The more site-specific your art is, the harder it is to impose a signature, because the art is interacting with the forces of the site - the smaller the project - a series of small gardens, for example - easier it is to develop a signature, because the situations are similar and constant, and the form can dominate the site. Architecture tends to dominate the site. Urban architecture tends to dominate the site even more than suburban or rural architecture. In Landscape architecture, you rarely have the power to totally changed the site. You're always playing what you are doing  in the landscape against that which you aren't doing: that which somebody else has done, or which is there before'' (page 26 - Peter Walker)

I could say I agree with the statement Peter Walker has said within his conversation with Yoji Sasaki. Landscape Architects tend to have a more difficult job to identify themselves within their landscape designs, if an landscape architect is designing an landscape surrounding an building, the landscape architect tends to approach the design in a more suitable way for the landscape to fit in with the surrounding architecture. So the landscape architect designs an landscape that suits the architecture and compliments the architecture, fits in with the architecture, so wheres the signature of the landscape architect if it's all about the architecture :)

Do you agree with Peter Walker ? What do you think ? :)

Martha Schwartz

 

Martha Schwartz (image from http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/people/faculty/schwartz/)

One of the other Landscape Architects I also looked in to within my research. Her background is in both fields of Fine Art - Print Making and Landscape Architecture. An landscape architect who raises solutions to the level of fine art within her landscape designs. 

Her use of unusual materials, bright colours and interest and attraction to Pop Art artists such as Andy Warhol, and Jasper Johns. Martha Schwartz is a woman who expresses her feelings within her designs freely. 

'' I'm the Queen of Low-Budget Jobs''

 (Martha Schwartz interview in the book - Martha Schwartz - Transfiguration of the Commonplace)

She is an landscape architect who has her own style and language within her designs, her landscape designs gives the audience an insight to her own thinking and her own language in design, but also allows the audience to interact within her landscape designs to understand the concept behind the design.

One of the things that has interested me while researching about Martha Schwartz is that like any other landscape architect she also works closely works with architects, but one of the factors about Martha Schwartz is that within her landscape projects, she requires architects to open up their buildings in order for the buildings to communicate with the surrounding landscape. So there wouldn't be isolation between the two or one over powering the other. 

In my opinion I think this is very important aspect especially in today's world we do get massive architectural designs were architecture does take over the landscape and does over power it's surrounding leaving the landscape in shadow. Working alongside architects in projects and designs that include landscapes in the surrounding when two professions come together I will say a more successful approach will be taken.

 

Burle Marx - A Man full of Inspiration

 

Burle Marx 
(Image taken from web http://www.macumbabeach.com/2010/03/burle-marx.php)

As one of our module for third year we were asked to write an critical essay on a topic of our own interest within Landscape Architecture. I decided to look in to the aspect of how art takes part in landscape architecture, how landscape architects combine art within their designs with the boundaries and limitations they take to make an successful design. Art & Design are both totally two different fields of media, both nowadays are used within landscape designs, which tend to be more artistic and expressive landscapes, art been opinion base and design been based on function and use so how does both blend together. Is Landscape Architecture becoming more of Art forms then Design?

So within my research I looked in to the background of many Landscape Architects who had a background history of Art then later on turned their career path to landscape architect but still had the influence of art within their landscape designs. Burle Marx was one of the Artists/ Landscape Architect caught my interest and has widened my inspiration within how I could approach landscape designs of my own work. 

Burle Marx is a man with talent that doesn't stop, been an Artist as well as Landscape Designer/ Architect, Painter, Sculptor, Jewellery Design, and a Singer what more talent can you ask for. Who has a master creative mind, where all his works are as successful. A great artist, whose mind and heart has no boundaries within his designs in landscape. His designs have a feel of culture and tradition, he combines his artistic mind with his designs.

His work has no boundaries, he doesn't worry about limits, his work has culture, love, passion, and spirit that has gained him an international reputation, these many not be the ideal things Landscape Architects first look into within a design, but surely I could see how different time has changed and how things has developed over the years of art been used within design.

The reason why I was hit by Burle Marx is mainly because I have been searching the right direction for myself as a future landscape architect, not knowing the balance between combining Art and Design in to my projects, I have came to the conclusion that I tend to have a more artistic side in approaching designs and don't much look into design functionality of my projects, this research has opened my outlook and ways how I should be more careful while approaching a design. I personally believe nowadays designs look more into functionality with a style of art involved within the design. 

A great book to read is Burle Marx - The Lyrical Landscape, which is foreword by Martha Schwartz a other very successful Landscape Architect who adds her artistic side to her landscape designs, and also admires Burle Marx's work has one of her inspirations.

As quoted within the book by Martha Schwartz;

'' When I think about Burle Marx, I am stuck by sheer gratitude for his existence. As I have always felt a bit of an outsider to the landscape architecture profession, I am forever searching for those kindred spirits who might guide my own exploration and give me faith that my own direction might be of use and bear fruit. Burle Marx has always been and will remain for me a shining light in the somewhat dim universe of landscape art and architecture.'' 

A book full of inspiration landscapes and garden designs with abstract landscape drawings, the use of bold strong colours. And the true story behind Burle Marx and his success.

(Images are taken from google images)

A Landscape Manifesto - Author Diana Balmori

''Landscape's role for our time must be redefined Now. The need is urgent. This book sketches twp major new tasks that come out of such redefinition, and shows how they can be accomplished.

First, Landscape can now create a new kind of livable city; second, through design it can broker the coexistence of human beings with the rest of nature. To design a livable city that coexists with nature as a whole will require establishing different relationship among parts. The harmful relations created by nineteenth-century industrialization will have to be revised in some cases, reversed on others. 

I have chosen a Manifesto as the format to express the critical shifts needed to carry out these tasks. You may be surprised by the use of the word Manifesto. Usually it means a rigid set of rules, pronounced in a stentorian voice, that you must (lest you fall of the right path). This Manifesto instead proposes the realignments required of our work and lives in order for us to participate in the permanent re-creation of our world. '' 

Diana Balmori

The book proposes  to a new definition of the landscape, with bringing together the concepts from biology, evolutionary theory, and ecology. Biology shows that even at the level of our cells, we are historical structure that adapts old pieces to new uses - but that history does not move toward and end we plan on. Evolutionary theory shows us a nature constantly changing, and us changing with it. Ecology puts us inside nature and shows our interdependence with its many parts.

Landscape Manifesto - 25 points

1.Nostalgia for the past and Utopian dreams for the future prevent us from looking at our present.

2. Nature is the flow of change within which humans exist. Evolution is its history. Ecology is our understanding of its present phase.

3. All things in nature are constantly changing. Landscape artists need to design to allow for change, while seeking a new course that enhances the coexistence of humans and the rest of nature.

4. Landscape forms encapsulate unseen assumptions. To expose them is to enter the economic and aesthetic struggles of our time.

5. Historical precedents do not support the common prejudice that human intervention is always harmful to the rest of nature. 

6. Shifts are taking place before our eyes. Landscape artists and architects need to give them a name and make them visible. Aesthetic expertise is needed to enable the transforming relations between humans and the rest of nature to break through into public spaces.

7. High visibility, multiple alliances, and public support are critical to new landscape genres that portray our present.

8. Landscape - through new landscape elements - enters the city and modifies our way of being in it.

9. New landscape elements can become niches for species forced out of their original environment.

10. The new view of plants as groups of interrelated species modifying each other, rather than as separate and fixed, exemplifies fluidity a main motif of landscape form. 

11. Nostalgic images of nature are readily accepted but they are like stage scenery for the wrong play.

12. in his History of Modern Taste in Gardening (1780), Horace Walpole writes that William Kent ''was the first to leap the fence and show that the whole of nature was a garden.'' Today landscape has leapt the fence in the opposite direction, to the city, making it part of nature.

13. Existing urban spaces can be rescued from their current damaging interaction with nature.

14. Landscape artists can reveal the forces of nature underlying cities, creating a new urban identity from them.

15. Landscape can create meeting places where people can delight in unexpected forms and spaces, inventing why and how they are to appreciated. 

16. A landscape, like a moment, never happens twice. This lack of fixity is landscape's asset.

17. We can heighten the desire for new interactions between humans and nature where it is least expected: in derelict spaces.

18. Emerging landscapes are becoming brand-new actors on the political stage.

19. Landscape renders the city as constantly evolving in response to climate, geography, and history

20. Landscape can show artist intention without imposing a predetermined meaning.

21. Landscape can bridge the line between ourselves and other parts of nature between ourselves and a river.

22. Landscape is becoming the main actor of the urban stage, not just a destination.

23. The edge between architecture and landscape can be porous.

24. Landscape can be like poetry, highly suggestive and open to multiple interpretations.

25. We must out the twenty-first century city in nature rather than put nature in the city. To put a city in nature will mean using engineered systems that function as those in nature and deriving form from them.

Digital Media: Landscape Graphics

Landscape Graphics: Plan, Section, and Perspective Drawing of Landscape Spaces, Author Grant W. Reid Fasla

One of the other books I will recommend will be Landscape Graphics: Plan, Section, and Perspective Drawing of Landscape Spaces.

 A great book with amazing graphic illustrations , again step by step guide to help you improve your technical drawing skills by hand, which later on can be worked on the computer for a more professional final piece of work. With great time saving techniques presented.For a beginner student with this book you will get the most out of graphic drawing. With different chapters and exercises you could chose the most relevant area in to enhance your drawing skills.The book has all the helpful areas within the process an landscape architect will be going through within a design process. Areas such as :

1. Program Development 

2. Inventory and Analysis - Content and Purpose within a design.

3. Design and Development - Conceptual Design (including concept plans, functional diagrams) and Preliminary Design (including perspective drawings, master plan, illustrative sections, proposed development plan)

4. Construction Details - Layout Plan, Planting Plan and Grading Plan 

I intend to work from my drawings and sketches and develop them afterwards on the programs, I find this more easy and time saving with the advantage of progressing solidly through my design works. And with the help from this book in how to free hand draw certain objects, plants, trees, and etc in the correct way has improved my skills in drawing and also has gave me the confidants in developing my work to the next stage. Not only simple drawing but it also teaches and guides you through how to do perspective drawings, sections and plans in the accurate way, where again later scanning in your work and defining your drawings and improving them on the design programs adds to your design work. 

Working this way develops my drawing skills and my computer skills, I intend to balance both out rather then concentrating on one, the balance between the two makes me work faster and produce better quality work. My computer skills are not as good as my drawing skills, but rather then spending more time trying to figure out things on the programs, I scan my drawings and work from them, from the help from this book my drawing skills have improved massively which saves me an awful a lot of time when it comes to developing it more on the programs. 

Not only this book but also the Digital Drawing for Landscape Architecture book has helped me in developing my skills, with the work from both books I believe I am developing my skills in both areas equally.

Digital Media - Digital Drawing for Landscape Architecture

Digital Drawing for Landscape Architecture - Contemporary Techniques and Tools for Digital Representation in Site Design -  Authors Bradley Cantrell & Wes Michaels

I would recommend this book to anyone who's studying landscape architecture. The step by step detailed guides helping you to develop and explore your skills in specific areas like creating digitally rendered plans, perspectives, visualisations, plans and sections, is just amazing how faster you can enhance your skills rather then spending hours in front of the computer trying to figure out how to use the program, not only you get to enhance your skills, techniques digitally it also helps with developing your understanding in different design programs. The outcome work at the end will look as good and professional. Practice makes prefect, once you get the hang of applying the techniques within your work, each and every time you design you will bring in your own style of working around that specific technique. 

At first I had difficulties getting the hang of applying the techniques and understanding how the software worked. A tip I will suggest will be first read through the specific technique you want to apply within your work, first read through the steps and familiarise yourself with the tools and the software, second time read through it normally and one the third attempt apply the technique step by step. Yes it might take time but it's a way of taking in the information slowly which will stay with you for the next time you apply the technique.

Above is the front cover of Digital Drawing for Landscape Architecture 

The Book has many professional works by landscape architects with guides in how to produce the same quality of work, the above photos by Mossop+Michaels Landscapes Architects, whom design-focused service dedicated to the implementation of sustainable landscapes. The firm is focused on the public landscape of cities, parks and open space systems and infrastructure. The collage/visualisation (top photo) is created  by using Photoshop, and  the section (bottom photo) is created by using Photoshop and Illustrator.