Ecology | IDEAS

Hidden from view in our day-to-day lives there exists a pattern and beauty much larger, much more comprehensive. From space these patterns reveal themselves as deep blue braided rivers and rich green plains, wetland patches, desert reds and yellows; all moving, all seemingly going somewhere. Amongst all our deep understanding of the natural sciences, and its relationships and complexity, there exists a simple beauty to it all. A secret that can only be revealed when we take a step back, and marvel at the tremendous scale of these natural systems.

When we design at a scale comparable to the vastness of these natural systems, the need exists to express as the earth does. When we design cities of 50, 100, or 1,000 square kilometer regions, we need to think as the earth does. There is an art to her work that needs to be present in ours. I am continually inspired by this interconnected beauty; a mosaic of oils and pastel that we can only hope to emulate in a small way. And so there must be an art to our ecology, both urban and natural. The two combined can form city patterns that can strive to achieve all those civic benefits that we speak so much of; be it interconnectivity, multiplicity, sustainability, and the like. We need to paint our cities as much as we plan them, aware that there is more to life and civicness than a land use plan and orderly density tabulation.

Our most beautiful cities were not afraid of an idea; be it Paris and her grand boulevards struck across its densely populated neighborhoods, or the genius of a simple but large park providing escape for the citizens of New York. Let us plan in bold strokes, weaving the natural and man-made into new urban forms worthy of the landscape they inhabit. Let our ideas guide us at any scale, from the smallest dwelling to the largest of all, planet earth.

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

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Opportunities abound for engineering encounters between guests and their food in the landscape – a breakfast orangerie where fruit is freshly plucked for juice, courtyard gardens planted in orchards of nuts and fruits, herbal lawns at the spa, a poolside planted with date palms. Many hotels are integrating local and on-site food production in a… Read more »

Many hotels are integrating local and on-site food production in a range of innovative ways, to draw in guests and enrich their experience. From roof-top vegetable gardens to bee-keeping, on-site goats, curing meats and homemade wine, these hotels are fully explore the relationship between local food production and hospitality.

Articles such as this one in the New York Times feature urban hotels that make more of the produce than just an ingredient. Some of the most intriguing strategies include the Elysian Hotel in Chicago that not only serves a local farm-based menu created around available produce, but also leases land at the Heritage Prairie Farm to grow specialty vegetables and keep bees.

Such a partnership benefits the hotel (chefs and bartenders request heirloom vegetables for signature menu items) but also, presumably, the farm which has a guaranteed income from the hotel while keeping the land in production. In this way the hotel’s buying practices become a form of activism that conserves working farmlands near urban areas.

Another partnership worth noting also takes place in Chicago, where the Marriott Downtown uses honey from their rooftop hives to create a special beer, made in partnership with a local brewer. Again, while the hotel gets a unique item to market, the brewery might benefit from a dedicated revenue stream.

One hospitality/agricultural project on the boards at SWA is the St. Regis Napa Valley. Tucked behind rolling hills, the resort – a combination of 175 hotel rooms, cottages, hillside units and 70 estate dwellings, will blend seamlessly into the landscape on a small portion of the Stanly Ranch winery. The masterplan calls for 50% of the site to remain in open space, 40% of that in working agriculture.

This is a slightly modified version of a post originally published on GrowCity, November 1, 2010.

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Posted by EllenBurke
in Arts and Culture, Urban Agriculture
on 21 January, 2012

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Natural waterway systems innately and efficiently manage flood waters, clean and polish polluted water, and provide habitat for a great number of animal and plant species. The drive over the past century to develop on the water’s edge has resulted in a severe deterioration of the world’s natural water systems, and the initial response of… Read more »

Posted by KevinShanley
in Bayou By Us
on 20 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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