A Shift in Modality; Exploring how landscape architecture design engages with large scale sites.

Landscape architecture for the last 20 years has scratched its head at how to understand large landscapes and human life on the ground together. Recent preoccupations with large scale urbanism, GIS and satellite imagery have drawn attention to this tension. The lack of connection is a persistent problem for the landscape discipline. Evans opened up the discussion of what representations do in architecture. Extending upon Evans, Corner opened up the potential for maps to provide access and the ability to analyse aspects of the landscape that were unavailable to someone on the ground. In the same essay he identified the strong tendency of large scaled representations to disconnect to life on the ground. He offered up techniques to join the power of maps to what happens on the ground and avoid this tendency. Though it is obviously closely related, the challenge of how to connect to life on the ground in the design of large-scaled landscapes has been given less direct attention than how to connect life on the ground using large-scaled representations. This research attempts to explore what digital technologies can contribute to this challenge, in particular drone and photogrammatic processes. Connolly has developed a critique of Corner’s efforts to connect the map to the ‘ground’. Relatedly, he and his collaborators, have developed a range of techniques for engaging with human life on the ground. This work involves fieldwork into ‘landscape assemblages’ and ‘landscape affects’. Such work has shown that what landscape does involves very particular relations between the moving human body and the spatial relations of the landscape, and that this has not been embraced in recent mappings and large scaled design work, resulting in a deferral from what human life does. Recent use of drones and photogrammetry in landscape design have tended to be focused on visualisation and/or technoscientific problems. In contrast, the current investigation proposes that drones and photogrammetry have the ability to produce representations of the landscape which capture, on the one hand, the relevant body-landscape relations involved in landscape assemblages, and correlate these with what these landscapes are doing—and on the other, the large scaled relationships associated with large landscape landscapes. This should allow the designer to be able to work between life on the ground and large scaled design much more readily. This work aims to begin to explore and develop ways of thinking, analysing, representing and designing suited to designing large scaled landscapes that are connected to human life.