Comment: Bad role models for landscape architecture Part III
In the third of our series looking at how bad design concepts can get projects off to a false start, Tim Waterman explores the shortcomings of the 'The Killer Robot'...
Many a landscape student's bête noire is the concept – the 'big idea' that drives the design. Ultimately, any site's big idea is its context and how that fits with its possible programme. Many design concepts actually prevent landscapes from functioning, and this series of short articles looks at a few of the ways projects can get off to false starts or come to bad ends.
Bad Concept No. 3 - The Killer Robot
Wouldn't it be wonderful if there was a simple formula for landscape design? Feed the site in as a variable (x marks the site), solve for x and, lo and behold, beyond the equals sign lurks a finished design. Actually, you're probably thinking, it wouldn't be wonderful. Landscape architects and garden designers would simply be out of work. Clients around the world could download the 'garden design' or 'master plan' app, and that would be that. Run app, print plan, hire contractor, job done.
On the Academy of Urbanism's Linked In group, there have, at the time of this writing, been 106 earnest responses to the question "I am trying to develop a more systematic approach to assesing (sic) how well a place is doing ...", which shows just how much interest there is in the robotic, systematised approach to landscape. We know a simple formula doesn’t exist, but computerised modelling is still seen as a viable approach to landscape and urban practice, despite the egregious example of traffic planning's universal failure to make better places anywhere through the use of very sexy and sophisticated models.
Models and formulas also demean our profession. The proliferation of short garden design courses based in a formulaic approach furthers the notion, dangerously amongst the general public, that a bit of careful shading with coloured pencil and the loving application of a bit of Euclidean geometry is all that's required for place making. Landscape design: it's just what you like, and just a bit of shrubbing it up. Child's play. Why on Earth would anyone spend eight years of their life working towards Chartership just to do that? The prevalence of facile shape-making approaches in garden design has led a couple of generations of landscape architects to seek to distance themselves from gardens – a peculiar act that could be compared to denying the existence of your leg while you're standing on it.
Not that this distancing has done much good. Formulaic approaches are writ large in a classic of the landscape architecture canon: Grant Reid's From Concept to Form in Landscape Design. Reid has now assimilated thousands of landscape designers into a colony of killer robots, manufacturing mindless, soulless geometric designs across the face of the Earth. There's no denying that it's easy. Begin with a circle (or a hexagon, or even an irregular polygon), click and place it around in CAD a bit, and presto, a garden design that functions only in plan and which stylistically evokes the golden year of 1985. Landscape design, as good practitioners know, happens in four, and probably more dimensions, and we must engage all of our senses in design that is spatial. The 2D plan drawing is not truly our friend, at least not when used in isolation, and certainly not when geometry alone is the driver for site design.
Tim Waterman is honorary editor of Landscape and is a lecturer in landscape architecture and urban design at Writtle School of Design
*Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the contributor and not necessarily those of the Landscape Institute.
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Thanks Tim for this, I really enjoyed your piece, and am most disappointed to find I missed the previous two….must start looking at the LI newsletter more closely!
off for a meeting with an architect to resolve their geometry driven scheme…..
My pet hate is ‘standards based design’ - as if following a book of standards somehow makes for good design. How many urban streets meet ‘standards’ but dont function as places for people and look ugly? How many useless wheelchair ramps take the unfortunate user way out of their way? - and often the rest of us too because no direct route is provided? How many cyclways in the UK make you laugh and cry at the same time by their sheer ridiculous clumsiness? By comparison, the killer robot garden designs illustrated are a vision of wonderfulness - because at least someone has tried to design for people, even if the result is but a pastiche short cut of that - unlike the mechanical tick box standards based designs that afflict and become characteristic of our many ‘crap towns’ in the UK.
graphismus gratuitus !!!!
I love formality but dont force !
Nell, I’ll be Euclidean if you’ll be…..that’s only human after all as you suggest.
Point taken and made, Tim.
The plan is of course still the indispensable linchpin, always has and always will be.
I’d extend the criticism of the formula approach beyond graphics books and garden design to the mainstream which has become consumed with codes, ‘pattern books’ and lists of rules for everything from urban design to sustainability, all detracting from the poetic ‘art’ of landscape design.
Of course, formulas can also be used artfully without doing ourselves out of a job as Le Notre and Lancelot will have told us.
The great British public still only let us get away with ‘pleasing’ geometry in back yards and city squares. They really haven’t got beyond Lancelot Brown’s picturesque notion of the wider landscape and never really knew it was ‘man’ made.
As Brodie says, the plan will always control – when it becomes a quantifiable General Arrangement Key. Prior to that, the plan is a hand drawn expression of the sensory, never drawn in isolation but accompanied by sketch sections, perspectives, isometrics – showing themes, devices, personality of materials, the designer, author of the concept of place that will convince the client to commission the production stage, when at last the poor old computer has a use.
The media and ‘celebrity’ - from ‘Ground Force’ to the Chelsea Flower Show have skewed public perception and emphasis of design – wherein the real skills lie in the problem of transcending ‘stage set mentality’ to projects of enduring, evolving meaning which must survive, or better drive (the imponderables of) ‘sustainability’ and ownership.
As Brodie says, the plan will always control…. when it becomes a quantifiable General Arrangement Key. Prior to that, the plan is a hand drawn expression of the sensory, never drawn in isolation but accompanied by sketch sections, perspectives, isometrics ... showing themes, devices, personality of materials, the designer, author of the concept of place that will convince the client to commission the production stage, when at last the poor old computer has a use.
The media and ‘celebrity’ ... from ‘Ground Force’ to the Chelsea Flower Show, have skewed public perception and emphasis of design – wherein the real skills lie in the problem of transcending ‘stage set mentality’ to projects of enduring, evolving meaning which must survive, or better drive the long term imponderables of ‘sustainability’ and ownership.