This is now an immersive, integrative environment
Last year (October 2007) I attended the ASLA’s national conference, which happened to be held here in San Francisco. So it was easy to attend a lot of the sessions. One morning there was a plenary session which featured four of the Landscape Architecture world’s leading designers. They sat on a podium before an audience of what seemed like upwards from 1,000 landscape architects and others. I was towards the middle of the room and could barely make out the four on the podium. To overcome this there was real-time video feed presented on two enormous screens above them. The screens were amplified by color and lighting surrounds to elicit a mood and help the audience focus on the activity on the podium.
It was pretty clear to me, though maybe not to many others, that while the content of the presentation was a comparative discussion of current landscape work among the four, the landscape that we were all participating in in real time was an interactive field. The physical world consisting of the set was just the basis of the landscape. The rest of the landscape was the aura of colors and lights, and the live screens – and the half-acre of audience in the darkened hall.
Similarly, the landscape “out there” – city streets, parks, natural areas, sports stadiums, office towers, highways and roads, etc., the kind of stuff typically designed by architects (the buildings), engineers (the roads), and landscape architects (the pedestrian environment and planting / natural areas) – is (just) the basis of our current landscape. In North American cities, at least, half the population it seems is now walking around with their mobile phones glued to their ears or viewing email and internet content on their Blackberries. This is now an immersive, integrative environment, in which the local landscape that we walk in is now a part of the virtual environment in which we have quite as deep, engaged, meaningful relationships – and vice versa.
Ten years ago this was not the case, perhaps. And in ten years from now it seems likely to me that it will be even more integrative, as 3-d content (as in electronic games and virtual communities) becomes more common, accessible, and naturalized.
Los Medanos College in Pittsburg, California, for which I was project manager at Smith & Smith, is an integrative, immersive environment. Exterior spaces are shaped for formal ceremonies, daily student use, and local community use, and campus entrances for both function and appearance. But integral to those exterior spaces are the irrigation, lighting, security, information kiosks, and other systems that are centrally, digitally controlled. Even the shape of exterior spaces is strongly influenced by the network / utility configuration that is mostly underground, with surface expression in light poles, in-ground vaults, the fountain jets, etc.
The clue for me for all of this is the very word “landscape”. “Landscape” ≠ “landscaping”. “Landscape” means “a composition of man-made spaces on the land” (page 7, JB Jackson 1996 “The Word Itself” in Reading the Vernacular Landscape). It is only a late 20th Century understanding of the word which misses the evolved, contemporary culture and its arising landscape.
Posted by geoffreykatz
at 5:30 PM PDT
Updated: Friday, 4 July 2008 3:41 PM PDT