Jillian Walliss - Landscape Architecture and Digital Technologies : re-conceptualising design and making

Landscape Architecture and Digital Technologies

Landscape Architecture and Digital Technologies explores how digital technologies are reshaping design and making in landscape architecture. While the potential of digital technologies is well documented within landscape planning and visualisation, its application within design practice is far less understood. This book highlights the role of the digital model in encouraging a new design logic that moves from the privileging of the visual to a focus on processes of formation, bridging the interface of the conceptual and material, the virtual and the physical.

Drawing on interviews and projects from a range of international designers, including Snhetta, Arup, Gustafson Porter, ASPECT Studios, Grant Associates, Catherine Mosbach, Philippe Rahm, PARKKIM, LAAC and PEG office of landscape + architecture among others, the authors explore the influence of parametric modelling, scripting, real-time data, simulation, prototyping, fabrication and Building Information Modelling on the design and construction of contemporary landscapes. This engagement with practice is expanded through critical reflection from academics involved in landscape architecture programs around the world that are reshaping their research and pedagogy to reflect an expanded digital realm.

Crossing critical theory, technology and contemporary design, the book constructs a picture of an emerging twenty-first-century practice of landscape architecture premised on complexity and performance. It also highlights the disciplinary demands and challenges in engaging with a rapidly evolving digital context within practice and education. The book is of immense value to professionals and researchers, and is a key publication for digital landscape courses at all levels.

Jillian Walliss has over 15 years experience as a landscape architecture academic in Australia and New Zealand. She works in the Landscape Architecture program at the University of Melbourne where she teaches landscape theory and design studios. Jillians research focuses on the relationship between theory, culture and contemporary design practice. Her most recent work investigates the potential of digital technologies to produce a new generation of urban open spaces, which feature the explicit manipulation of climatic phenomena.

Heike Rahmann is a landscape architect at RMIT University and has worked with various practices within the fields of landscape architecture and urban design in Germany, Japan and Australia. Her research explores the intersection of landscape, technology and contemporary urbanism with focus on design practice and theory. Her publications include the co-authored book Tokyo Void: Possibilities in Absence (Jovis, 2014), which examines notions of vacancy and transformation processes in one of the largest urban areas in the world.

Landscape Architecture and Digital Technologies

Re-conceptualising design and making

Jillian Walliss and Heike Rahmann

First published 2016

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2016 Jillian Walliss and Heike Rahmann

The right of Jillian Walliss and Heike Rahmann to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Names: Walliss, Jillian, author. | Rahmann, Heike, author.

Title: Landscape architecture and digital technologies : re-conceptualising design and making / Jillian Walliss and Heike Rahmann.

Description: Abingdon, Oxon [UK] ; New York : Routledge, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015021219| ISBN 9780415745864 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780415745857 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781315713526 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Landscape architecture--Computer-aided design. | Landscape design--Data processing. | Visualization.

Classification: LCC SB475.9.D37 W35 2016 | DDC 712.0285--dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015021219

ISBN: 978-0-415-74586-4 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-415-74585-7 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-71357-6 (ebk)

Typeset in Univers 8.5/13.5 pt

by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

Contents

There has never been an easier time for designers to engage with the digital realm. Designers can now explore the creative potential of computational design, with minimal mathematical knowledge, aided by more accessible programming languages that transform designers into toolmakers to customise software for their own needs. Hardware advancements offer designers autonomy to define and gather their own data, fabrication techniques such as 3D printing and CNC routing can now be accessed at minimal cost, while the emergence of open source resources offers unprecedented access to a collaborative community in which to exchange and share ideas.

In comparison to architecture, these digitally driven design opportunities have been slow to influence landscape architecture. This disparity in adoption is reflected in the projects featured in the 2012 publication Digital Landscape Architecture Now, where almost half of the profiled firms are architectural or art practices. This observation led us to ask why is it that landscape architecture has been so hesitant to engage with a digital design practice? In asking this question, we also became inspired to look more closely for evidence of change.

For the past 3 years we have been working with leading international landscape architects and urban designers, practitioners and academics to construct a record of an emerging digital design practice of landscape architecture. This book highlights how designers apply a range of digital technologies and associated operative techniques in the conceptualisation, design, and construction of form, materiality and systems. We see the book as a work in progress, rather than a manifesto, presenting a snapshot of contemporary developments which we encourage students, academics and practitioners to analyse and debate. Crossing theory, technology and practice, the book uncovers a contemporary design practice embracing complexity and performance, well positioned to engage with the pressing challenges of the twenty-first century such as climate change and intense urban growth.

Importantly, we offer a new generation of landscape architects already engaged with digital technologies (often self-taught) much needed direction in how to meaningfully apply digital techniques and tools within the distinctive disciplinary framework and concerns of landscape architecture. For more experienced practitioners, we provide an outlook on where practice and design opportunities may develop in the next decade, offering direction for implementing and embedding the digital realm within design practice and pedagogy. And, finally, we offer suggestions on how these two generational positions may engage each others strengths to advance and shape the discipline.