> = < (convergent – parallel – divergent): 110211

A move away from ameliorative and scenographic designs toward more productive, engendering strategies necessitates a parallel shift from appearances and meanings to more prosaic concerns for how things work, what they do, how they interact, and what agency or effects they might exercise over time. A return to complex and instrumental landscape issues involves more organizational and strategic skills than those of formal composition per se, more programmatic and metrical practices than solely representational.

- James Corner
Eidetic Operations and New Landscapes, 1999

Whether natural or artificial, landscapes come into being through transformational processes (such as farming, town planning, weather and plate tectonics) unfolding on their surfaces and in their depths. Though these processes may occur on time scales too long to be humanly perceptible, a landscape must be considered more a process of becoming than a fixed condition. Now working individually, you will continue transforming the landscape, testing its limits to produce surface.

gobi desert - image via google earth

the netherlands - image via google earth

GROUP LANDSCAPE

Before beginning individual landscapes, the group landscape and material analysis must be complete. The landscape model must be spray-painted with Krylon indoor/outdoor primer in All-Purpose Gray. This is available at Janovic and other paint/art stores around the city. Call ahead for availability.

INDIVIDUAL LANDSCAPE

Choose an 18” wide x 36” long zone of the group landscape that features at least three strand crossings and significant quantities of horizontal surface. Rebuild this portion of the landscape in foam. Modify procedures for building units and strands to produce larger amounts of smoother surface. Selectively increase the resolution of molding profile parts to increase smoothness of strands. Selectively modify (stretch) molding profiles to increase horizontally oriented surface areas. Carefully maintain transformative and combinatorial logics of the material system though all modifications.

Begin constructing your own Rhino model of this modified landscape. Reflect modifications to the material system in your own version of the group material analysis diagrams.

studio description......................

Jorge Luis Borges’ short story, The Garden of Forking Paths proposes a model for the world composed of multiple splitting strands. In the story, temporal strands form “a growing, dizzying web of divergent, convergent, and parallel times.” This notion of convergent, parallel, and divergent strands served as a model for spatial explorations in the studio. Work began along two parallel tracks: a modeling exercise based on cutting extruded wood molding profiles and re-assembling them into strands with variable curvature, and a mapping exercise studying the organization of a braided river. Together, these exercises led toward building a braided field of strands.

Once braided, strands produced a landscape of nascent surfaces and quasi-interiorities. When viewed in terms of site / intervention or landscape / inhabitant, these surfaces and interiorities were seen to have effective and affective potentials. As described by John Rajchman, effective potentials are grounding; constructed qualities of surface, enclosure, and atmosphere suggest a level of stability in the earth. Affective potentials are ungrounding; they suggest open-ended trajectories of bodies in space. As such, landscape and intervention operated in concert to produce effect and affect in strands of space and time. Final spatial propositions were not attempts to insert movements or narratives into a preformed framework, but sought to release figures from this type of prescription and allow them to navigate alternative paths.

> = < (convergent – parallel – divergent)

110211 - limit / surface

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