Andrew Watkins

SWA Group has announced the 2012 winners of our Patrick Curran Fellowship program, an internal research award that seeks to further the art and science of landscape architecture. We received 29 applications and selected 10 proposals (two were merged into one) that support our fellowship mission as well as contribute to the firm’s reputation as a world leader in the landscape architecture field. Fellows will receive paid time off to work in their project in addition to up to $10,000 in expenses. Here are the Fellowship Winners:

Beyond the Bayou — Pavel Petrov

The goal of Beyond the Bayou is to produce a documentary on landscape architecture that highlights the landmark Buffalo Bayou, Brays Bayou and the entire Houston Bayou waterway network. This project will serve as a catalyst for change in an effort to rehabilitate similar struggling ecosystems.

Digital: Real — Mandana Parvinian and Don Xu

The “design process” is undergoing significant change as a result of the new tools of advanced 3D modeling software. This new process offers designers new forms with sophisticated patterns and spatial curvatures that surpass conventional geometric forms. Visually intriguing, these forms are both difficult to represent in technical drawings and manufacture with conventional methods. This project will explore how these forms become a reality.

SWA Graphic Library — Zane Busbee and Jean Casillas

The goal is to collectively strategize and develop a digital library that would speed up the process of rendering illustrations. The idea is to create an updated and expansive library of graphic materials to assist in the efficiency of creating the renderings and other illustrations. The development of a graphics library will greatly improve the production time of rendering in plan, section, elevation and perspective.

Beyond the Green Myth — Youngmin Kim

This project seeks to revisit current sustainable planning and design methods that the field of landscape architecture has regarded as established principles. Recent scientific articles have refuted these practices, but this project seeks to verify current sustainable planning and design methods based on the most recent scientific data and facts. It also will examine how landscape architecture can incorporate new scientific knowledge to the design.

Hope Initiative — Huicheng Zhong

The goal of this project is to design a courtyard and prepare design development drawings for the Gongxing School, a Hope School in the Sichuan Province. The project also seeks to promote a sense of social responsibility for Chinese young professionals through the media. YOUTHLA, a nonprofit organization cofounded by Zhong, will recruit and direct volunteers to support the project.

Material Research in China — Shuang Yu

The goal of Material Research is to determine materials, local manufacturers and suitable construction methods for the most common material in China. The research will also emphasize on finding construction potentials for local/traditional materials as well as for the use of new contemporary materials in China. Following the research, an open database with this data will be accessible for SWA staff.

Material Reuse — Michael Hee and Alec Hawley

Material Reuse is geared towards providing a better understanding about reuseable material availability/sourcing, costing and implementation. The project seeks to create a template that can provide valuable information to SWA employees regarding investigated materials as well as a structured format for further investigation and reporting in an effort to streamline and encourage greener practices within SWA.

Social Entrepreneurship — Andrew Watkins

As the world’s population shifts to urban cities in the developing world, how can SWA develop a business model that is flexible enough to interact in this exploding market, a market that is 2.5 billion people strong and growing? As designers, we have skills that can affect change in these environments. This project seeks to develop a business model for SWA that can engage in a profitable practice of social entrepreneurship, effectively responding to challenges faced by cities in the developing world.

SWApp and Place App — Yu-Peng Hu and Jihyun Qu

Originally two submissions, the following project is a combination of two similar submissions. The goal of both projects is to connect SWA to the community, professionals, clients and potential clients.

The SWApp seeks to create an app exclusive to SWA that will provide a map service of all SWA projects around the globe. The app will act as an interactive projects tour guide, helping potential clients who seek to visit the firm’s public projects but do know how to get there.

The Place App will allow you to browse through the firm’s current portfolio of design and architecture. It will provide exclusive access into its award-winning buildings in the form of interactive guides when visiting the buildings.

Urban Villages — Judy Qu

This project seeks to observe the changes of urban villages in Guangzhou under the background of urbanization. This project will entail visits to redeveloped and under-redeveloped urban villages, develop case studies on urban and landscape design and create potential business opportunities in China for SWA.

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Posted by Sarah Peck
in Social Impact
on 17 August, 2012

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More than half of the world’s population currently lives in urban areas. Of this, 70% of the population is located in developing nations and this percentage is rapidly rising, increasing to about 95% by 2060. Urban populations in developing nations face severe challenges—socially, economically and environmentally. For example, 30% of urban populations worldwide live in slums. As designers, we have skills that can affect change in these environments—we have the ability to coordinate programmatic needs with spatial solutions that improve the quality of life.

As the world’s population is shifting to urban cities in the developing world, how can we develop a business model that is flexible enough to interact in this exploding market, a market that is 2.5 billion people strong and growing? Developing markets are rife with challenges—direct funding capacity, political stability, location and complex social structures to name a few. Yet, these areas are also ripe with opportunities—multifaceted funding interests, abilities to leapfrog technology, innovative organizational models and creative forms of sustainability that are often non-technical. It is easy to understand how the skills we’ve acquired from working on some of the most innovative projects in the developed world could benefit projects in the developing world. Could this also work in the other direction, can we learn skills from working in the developing world that would give us an advantage in the developed world?

A business approach that may prove useful in strategizing how to increase our design work in the developing world is the concept of social entrepreneurship. Though this concept is nothing new, it has attracted increased attention in the last five to ten years, both as a way for businesses to have a greater and more direct impact on issues they find important and as an alternative to international aid models that have increasingly come under criticism for their long-term sustainability. Social entrepreneurship attempts to organize business around a social issue rather than a client. They are mission driven. This model may have multiple clients that each support the engagement of a single issue, possibly with different agendas that are organized and aligned by the entrepreneur. This model is therefore far more challenging in developing and managing clients or funding sources, yet provides distinct opportunities in its ability to focus an organization’s mission. Social entrepreneurship is ground up rather than top down.

Two primary business models exist for social entrepreneurship. As defined by Samer Abu-Saifan in Social Entrepreneurship: Definition and Boundaries, social entrepreneurship can either be a non-profit organization with an earned income strategy or a for-profit company with a mission driven strategy. On the non-profit end of the spectrum, these organizations would aim for mission growth while operating as a self-sufficient entity from their earned income and not reliant on grants or donations in the way that most non-profits currently are. Alternatively, for-profit companies would be aim for profit growth in order to sustain a mission goal.

How can social entrepreneurship be incorporated into the way we do business? How can we explore new funding sources to do project work? What business models are we not considering as the basis for project creation?

References:

Samer Abu-Saifan (2012). Social Entrepreneurship: Definition and Boundaries.

UN-Habitat. State of the World’s Cities.

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Posted by Andrew Watkins
in Social Impact
on 5 July, 2012

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In recent posts we’ve been discussing art and science as related to ecology. Art and science are two concepts that are generally considered to be binaries-terms in opposition to one another. Yet we are interested in creating hybrids between these two, exploring relationships in which art and science are fused together in our design methodology…. Read more »

Hybridity refers to a mixture in which the constituting parts are not just combined but thoroughly distributed amongst one another. Hybrids maintain characteristics from their original elements yet form distinctly unique conditions and relationships. Initially a biological or agricultural term, hybridity has also become a philosophical term espoused to linguistics and more broadly, globalization—not just referencing recent forms of globalization but focused on the way in which civilizations have mixed throughout human development. (See Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Globalization and Culture: global mélange, 2004). Hybridity itself has become a mix of both science and culture.

The hybridization of art and science within an ecological design methodology has the potential to create innovative relationships not otherwise possible when starting from either condition on its own. Akin to the classic form versus function tug-of-war that permeated design methodologies throughout the 20th century, hybridity suggests form AND function, creating no distinction between the successes of one ideal versus the other.

In our design methodology of built environments, we strive to create as little distinction between the art and science of our proposals, believing that one is integrally tied to the other—beauty is analogous to the organization of natural processes. Just as art is a process of creation through the properties of its medium, design of the built environment can use properties of natural processes as the medium for formal expression. Not only does this fuse the performative characteristics of design to the formal characteristics, it also suggests that the design process may be more closely linked to the actual construction process. Just as art is the creation—the final product, a hybridized design methodology may move beyond just an a priori representation to become the actual final creation. As form and performance are more closely tied together, design becomes less focused on the final form than on a process, constructed and natural.

Thus, we seek to combine the scientific understanding of natural processes with their formal exhibition into an artistic composition that reflects an intentional vision. This is the form of ecology.

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Posted by Andrew Watkins
in Urban Ecologies
on 21 January, 2012

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As designers, we have the responsibility to intentionally form the urban environment, to “paint the city in bold strokes, as O’Malley writes in “The Art of Ecology, the Art of Urbanism,” inspired by the way natural processes create beautiful patterns at a large scale. O’Malley’s post triggered some critical ideas about our intentionality as designers, specifically in relation to the method or process by which we transfer design inspirations into our own formal concepts. Ecological design inspiration from natural patterns brings up an interesting problem: we find inexplicable beauty in the form of nature, forms that we desire to emulate both for their formal beauty and for their ecological performance, yet nature does not rely on the intention of a designer for its form but rather on a set of natural laws and processes—gravity, erosion, climate—that have acted upon the earth based upon rules set in place long ago.

Several questions arise: In the same manner that natural patterns do not rely directly on a designer for their formal expression, should designers focus their design intention on forms or processes—that is, static descriptions or flexible guidelines? How much can we control the formal product of a design in a flexible, ever-changing environment? Should we think of ‘form’ as an initial intervention, subject to change over time, or as a fixed entity, such that the landscape never changes? Increasingly in our work, we strive to create places that change over time – that bend and yield with the processes and systems of the landscape. How do we draw this? How do we design this? In the end, how do we communicate our vision for an ecological city – something that is always changing over time? The subject of our intention—the agency with which we design and communicate our ideas—continues to be a topic of critical discussion.

An enlightening correlation to both these questions and O’Malley’s original poetic reference to the painter can be found in James Corner’s exploration of representation. In ‘Representation and Landscape’, Corner describes how an artist’s medium directly influences the formal representation of their intention—the medium, be it paint or metal or a digital tool, determines a set of possibilities in the final piece. In some regards, the final piece embodies the performative characteristics of its medium, not just the design intent. In fact, as Corner recognizes, some artists may not know the final form of the piece when they begin their work but rather rely on the properties of the medium with which they are working to lead them to the final form. [Corner]

For ecological design, our mediums are the processes—natural, social, and economic—that define a living system or an urban environment. Ecological design, as defined by Van der Ryn and Cowan, is “any form of design that minimizes environmentally destructive impacts by integrating itself with living processes.” [Van der Ryn]

Corner goes on to identify that designers are one step removed in the artist’s process—our hands do not touch the materials that will finally construct our designs. Rather, we use representations, traditionally drawings and models, to communicate our design intent to a builder—the intermediary who actually constructs the project. For Corner, the distanced condition of the designer from their medium results in an informative essay on representation, an exploration of the drawings we use as designers. For us, particularly in ecological design, this same realization allows us the opportunity to identify the medium with which we do directly interact and construct a process in which we may ‘paint’—in which we explore the relationship between medium and form. Our challenge is to understand the connection between the formal and performative characteristics of ecological processes within the strategy of our design intent.

References:

Corner, James. ‘Representation and Landscape’. Theory in Landscape Architecture: A Reader, 2002.

Van der Ryn S, Cowan S. Ecological Design. Island Press, 1996, p.18

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Posted by Andrew Watkins
in Arts and Culture, Urban Ecologies
on 21 January, 2012

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A recent review of student work at Hong Kong University with Professor Dorothy Tang elicited striking correlations to some of our recent posts on Ecology, Art and Science. Check out these beautiful projects that exhibit critical analysis and striking formal synthesis. The physical appearance of landscape patterns are dictated by internal logics or external operations… Read more »

The physical appearance of landscape patterns are dictated by internal logics or external operations responding to site, climate, physics, chemistry, and geometries. Students at the University of Hong Kong analyzed an existing landscape pattern through its geometry, formation, site, and boundaries in order to understand the operations that condition its physical form. These operations include climatic forces (sun, wind, rain), access to water (irrigation), interruptions and barriers (snow fences, water’s edge), mechanical limitations (turning radius on a road), and cultural political norms (land subdivision). These patterns are typically adaptable to its context, flexible in function, and ephemeral in form.

Rules and Operations

After understanding the operations and processes that form the chosen landscape pattern, students then apply their knowledge to manipulate certain parameters and re-create a unique landscape surface that is not simply a 2D pattern, but begin to take on 3 dimensional qualities.

STEP 1: Identify a landscape pattern

STEP 2: Find operational parameters

STEP 3: Generate new pattern

STEP 4: Create a Thick 2D

Patterning

From the shifting sands of the Gobi Desert, the Alaskan kettle lakes formed by glacial retreats, to rice terraces in western China and Bingham Canyon Mine in Utah, students interrogated unfamiliar territories and landscape processes through observation, research, and drawing. These landscape operations vary in time, scale, degree of human intervention, and natural processes. Jason Ng discovered Bolivian villages that subdivided land equally in a radial pattern and applied that principle on a landscape with extreme topography; Esther Fung photographed ice melting under various external forces to simulate the formation of kettle lakes; Lance Wong obsessed over slopes and turning radiuses to design a beautiful mine-dump; Alex Lee inverted the logics of rice terraces into a new topographical form; Vicky Lam regularized river channel migration over time; and Twiggy Ngo manipulated wind erosion patterns in the desert.

Landscape patterns are shaped by a multitude of complex forces and are impossible to model or simulate accurately. One can only speculate the potential outcomes of the application of certain operations on the landscape—it is an open-ended system. Despite these limitations, the reinterpretation of these processes could still yield inventions of form and space that are responsive and adaptive to a constantly shifting landscape—a material landscape that acknowledges the complexities of time and change.

Acknowledgements

“Patterning Landscapes” is the result of student explorations at the University of Hong Kong during the fall term of 2011. Third year undergraduate students in the Division of Landscape Architecture embarked on this 3 week investigation of landscape form and operations as an introduction to their landscape planning studio. All images are courtesy of the University of Hong Kong.

See Stan Alan’s article “Mat Urbanism: The Thick 2-D” in CASE: Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital and the Mat Building Revival edited by Hashim S

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Posted by Andrew Watkins
in Urban Ecologies
on 14 October, 2011

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Posts Tagged: Andrew Watkins

The Form of Ecology: Hybridity

The Form of Ecology: Art, Science and Urbanism

Patterning Landscapes

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