Beyond mere illustration

Abstract

The layer cake of Ian McHarg. Catherine Mosbach and a mouldy glass of sangria. Roland Gustavsson and the forest-time transects. The eidetic collages of Anton James and the spare motations of Lawrence Halprin. The chocolate bar of Georges Descombes. The site-responsive mowing regimes of Martí Franch or Liska Chan’s weaving of tall prairie grass. The axonometrics of Jean CanneelClaes. Each new way of drawing or modelling or engaging with the medium of landscape stimulates new ways of configuring space, of thinking about the experience of place and natural processes. McHarg unpacked and analysed landscape in layers to understand complex natural systems. For Canneel-Claes, the axonometric enabled a synoptic view of a garden that showed how its elements worked together. Mosbach’s observation of mould prompted consideration of how to work with dynamic processes in the gardens of the Louvre Lens. Halprin attempted to bridge the distance between representation and human experience through notations that described movement through a space. Drawings, models, installations each hold a question, an inquiry explored through a process of making and refined in response to a physical artifact; drawing becomes thinking rather than illustrating. Notable theorists such James Corner, Catherine Dee and Elizabeth Meyer have each linked shifts in methods of drawing or making to innovation in landscape design practice. James Corner argues that drawing holds the possibility of ‘forming a field of revelation, prompting one to figure previously unforeseen landscapes of a richer and more meaningful dimension’.1 Catherine Dee, the founding editor of both JoLA and the visual methods section ‘Thinking Eye’, observes that poetic-critical drawings, made through sustained observation, are rich in thinking, and redolent with evocation. Attentive to the transience of landscape, such drawings enable the evolution of landscape understandings and are simultaneously propositional.2 Meyer makes a similar connection between innovation in methods of site analysis and new disciplinary questions, noting that an increased interest in phenomenology, feminist critique and Kamni Gill Imke van Hellemondt Sonia Keravel Anaïs Leger-Smith Bianca Maria Rinaldi Usue Ruiz Arana Janike Kampevold Larsen Ursula Wieser Benedetti