The significance of time in the design of a public landscape Exploring accepted, experimental and relational dimensions of drawing time

This paper revisits a built project to reveal a hidden and experimental ambition for a public space through drawing in time. Behind the project’s initial inception lay the designer’s motivation to challenge, open and expand the consideration of time in the way in which public landscapes are invented, configured and received. As such, the project sought to attend both to the way in which time manifests as a design consideration through drawing and to the way in which time could be conceptually and experientially sustained in the afterlife of the completed work. In the inevitable ebbs and flows of productivity and decision taking that ran through the project, the designer came to realize that the ambitions outlined above stretched beyond their client’s comprehension of what the project could and should be. Instead, an aspiration to design “in time” became subservient to the client and stakeholders’ focus on the material manifestation of the work as a visual object and to the project’s public reception when it was deemed “complete”. For the designer this meant that opportunities to expand design thinking into practices tied to the continuing and relational opportunities of the space remained disappointingly determinate and closed. By revisiting the existing representations and by making new drawings that were more explorative and unburdened by the conditions of project delivery, new liberty was found, revealing a unique bond between drawing in time and the relational opportunities of the work.


Introduction
As long as we structure our lives according to assumed parameters of a static space and a rectilinear time, we will be able to ignore or overlook, our thorough dependence upon the earth around us. Only when space and time are reconciled into a single, unified field of phenomena does the encompassing earth become evident, once again, in all its power and its depth, as the very ground and horizon of all our knowing (Abram 1996, p. 217).
An t-Eilean (The Island, Gaelic) is an open air space, 16 metres square, that occupies a central position in an educational campus in the Highlands of Scotland. The commission began in 2010 and construction was completed in 2015. The space unites sculpture, building and garden to form a unique landscape. Visitors experience An t-Eilean as a floating courtyard open to the sky with framed views to surrounding features of the landscape. The space is connected to the land by a slender timber boardwalk. As a project, An t-Eilean responds to questions of site and place by seeking to make manifest the distinctiveness of the highland landscape. A distinctiveness that, in the mind of the designer, hinges upon the contrast between the landscape's solidity (thick, gradual) and its atmosphere (faint, fleeting). The first design steps of the project trod a familiar path; plotting an orientation that would maximize a relationship with the sun whilst maintaining critical views back out into the wider landscape, in particular the mountain Ben Wyvis. Upon these foundational relationships with the wider world a finer mesh of more nuanced and time-based preoccupations grew that sought a more evolving and relational impetus for An t-Eilean as a project. In the writing that follows, the paper will address the way in which drawing supported the evolution of the design and the way in which it enabled explorations of the relational and time to converge, at the very least in the imagining of the project.

Context
Time's most compelling associations with our own sense of being in the world are undoubtedly puzzling and perhaps, for some, a utopian and fictional pursuit rather than a professional activity which is actualizing and real. In an attempt to determine the prospective dimensions of drawing time in relation to An t-Eilean (the project), the manifestation of time has been considered within this paper through the potential of the sky, light and shadow and to the representation of planting in time. Thus, An t-Eilean as a static and silent entity, that sought to draw in energy and make manifest the perceivable passing of time in the landscape within and around it, will be interrogated to understand where it might have succeeded and where and why its intentions fall short of the designer's ambitions.
Two sources offer an invocation as to the way in which time and space could be imagined as mutually sustaining entities as you read this paper. Firstly, in the final chapter of About Looking, John Berger (2009) writes of the significance of questioning the limits of a field and its seen and unseen beauty. As he lies in the field and engages with it as an "attendant" entity he wonders what lies beyond its enclosing sphere where "The wire around you is the horizon" (Berger, 2009, p. 199). With similar appeal for the design disciplines who deal with the affective realization of space through time, Nigel Thrift cites Humphrey Repton as an inventor of a "knowledge of disposition", able to "integrate broad lines and detail in order to produce aesthetic/affective effects which were more than their parts" (2008, p. 121). Thrift argues that knowledge and experience of site is a sixth sense that can sharpen our ability to comprehend what is really at stake as we shape the world around us. Of particular relevance to this paper is Thrift's reference to Repton's ability to develop picturing practices that represent "sites that are consciously meant to shift and change" (2008, p. 121). Thus, the idea that a public space could be "attendant" to the world around it in the same way in which Berger's field is co-extensive with its context or in the way in which we might draw space as it shifts and changes in a way that unleashes its "thereness" (Thrift, 2008, p. 121) lies behind the motivation of the enquiry and the way in which time is represented through the drawings presented in the paper. FIGURE 1 An t-Eilean: set in a loch within the campus. (Lisa Mackenzie, 2010) When you step outside, your senses necessarily heighten. Exiting the threshold of your workplace or home, out you go, from A to B, and all of a sudden, the plethora of environmental stimuli that surround you increase and intensify. And yet, so often we advance through our working life in a state of distraction, too busy to look above us, to register the sky, to notice a shadow, to contemplate atmosphere, to appreciate the constant switches and changes around us. Many of us feel that in order to relate to our environment in a meaningful way we must exit the urban realm and the setting of our daily lives. An t-Eilean sought to offer an alternative experience within the urban realm, in the immediate vicinity of workplaces, in the heart of a place designed for growing knowledge, where people are busy and distracted with the practices of the everyday. Although experiencing An t-Eilean offers a different contact with the environment to being in a forest glade or on a river's edge, the roofless space nevertheless "holds" visitors within its envelope, slowing people down long enough that they can register the passing of time. Figure 1 below is an early representation used to describe the idea of the project to the client. Although its depiction of time is not immediately apparent, the drawing was composed to convey the subtlety of relationships that exist between the bounding elements of the space (the walls) and its surroundings. Depending on the time of day, shadows soften the tectonic presence of the walls in the landscape as their existence merges into external planes of water or internal planes of stone. Although time is not represented directly, the intent of the drawing, through its texture and illusionary quality, is to draw the viewer into the possibility of An t-Eilean as an entity attendant to time: a space where you could actively register and unite with the changing atmosphere around you.
In the Afterlife of Gardens, John Dixon Hunt describes the "losses and gains in transferring 'landscape architecture' from painting or stage to a real topography" (2004, p. 84). The challenge being that one will never really know the way in which the visitor might behave within a designed and imagined space. Sharing Hunt's awareness as to the inevitable polysemic programme of a public space, An t-Eilean did not seek for its users to behave in a particular way towards it, either as a space or as an object. When its configuration first touched down on paper the intention was that it would allow for spatial discovery through a deliberate absence of programme. The way into the space, over water and then through the heavy portal of the northern wall, was designed to emit contrasting impressions of lightness and weight, the minimal aesthetic allowing attention, perhaps through a positive boredom, to inevitable interactions between form, materials and the atmosphere of the surroundings. Its siting in a mirror pool of water, replicating a secondary but dynamic reflection of form, An t-Eilean itself registers and traces time dynamically into its immediate planar setting. In Figure 2 and Figure 3, the representation of time is limited in respect of the design ambition denoted above. Although Figure 2 attempts to represent the qualities of winter light, it is likely that anyone viewing the drawing would need that interpretation to be made for them. Thus, the potential of An t-Eilean and its materiality and ideality is lost by failing to offer a counter drawing, as Repton might have done, to set the project in a different time, giving a different account of the atmosphere. The limitations in respect of evoking time in Figure 3 is determined by its omission of shadows which, had they been drawn, would have represented the unique agency of the space to draw and redraw its own outline into its context throughout the day.
In the environment of the campus, where people are largely confined indoors, within buildings designed to function determinately, An t-Eilean sought an opportunity to generate a different fitting-together of time and space. The landscape itself condensed into the form of a garden assigned to provide an experience of time that only a garden could, indeterminate in the exposure to so many variable and changing factors, but also reconciled through the simplicity of the sculptural courtyard form. Such an opening up of spatiality finds theoretical encouragement in the work of Doreen Massey and Chantal Mouffe: "The crucial recognition, from our point of view, is that the closure of structures is directly related to their a-temporality" (Massey, 2005, p. 42). In An t-Eilean, space, temporality and duration are opened up by designing an unroofed space where the visitor can interact with the movement of sun and shadow, with the highly varied and transitory presences and absences of the borrowed world around it. As a garden, An t-Eilean calls on the paradox of presence and absence, of open and closed, and of the embodied experience. After all "time is relative to the processes that shape it, the organism that experiences it" (Spirn, 1998, p. 89).
With these complex pursuits in the background, it seemed necessary that the form of the space itself should be straightforward and thus stage a minimal aesthetic. In this respect, the project draws on the origins of minimalism to offer a different kind of experiential interaction for the visitor and specifically the chapter by the artist Craig Staff in the book Modes of Spectating (2019). Here Staff's insights trace the way in which minimalism dealt with embodiment, ambulation and duration and the way "the experiential basis of the minimalist artwork entailed a kinesthetic exchange that unfolded within a set of spatio-temporal coordinates that were necessarily "real" or actual as opposed to being fictive or illusionistic" (Staff, 2019, p. 207). Emulating minimalist sensibilities, An t-Eilean's internal wall formations are rectilinear, perpendicular and repeating; formations achieved specifically through columns and pleats cast in situ as the walls were fabricated on site. These elements began to exceed their first drawn manifestation ( Fig. 4) in the way in which they engage time when they were modelled three dimensionally (Fig. 5). The pictorial stills of the modelling process reveal tensions and movement generated by rhythms of sunlight and shadow that are held and intensified through the internal details of the space. An t-Eilean acts as an envelope and frame registering the slow passing of the day in the very fabric of the structure.

Research
Although I had viewed time and the application of durational thinking as fundamental to the learning culture of the Landscape Architectural design studios that I taught, I had not deliberately tested my own assertions as to the significance of time in a project. Therefore, when the opportunity arose, it was vital that the space should manifest as a spatial experiment engaging design research to test the significance of time -the making of an interstice. 1 A space to counter existing landscape experience modalities and, as Staff (2019) puts it, "recast the categorical boundaries" that separate the "viewer from the viewed". (p. 207) Clients do not often ask designers to make meaning or to meditate on what it means to be in the world. Very few clients, beyond asking for a maintenance plan that they can cost, ask designers to imagine the unfolding of a project through time, setting out a framework where its relational potential might change and progress as society itself evolves. In contrast, and at the extreme of timescaping theory, Vincent Ialenti argues for meaningful alternatives to "shallow time disciplines" where "forces of short-termism may seem so deeply rooted that, when reformers call for change, our guts tell us progress is impossible" (Ialenti, 2020).
1 Saskia Sassen's use of the term "interstice" (2016) is quoted in the text of this chapter. I would note that the term first came to my attention in the writing of Nicolas Bourriaud in his discussion of Artwork as Social Interstice in Relational Aesthetics (Bouriaud, 2002, p. 14). If we consider the professional practice of landscape architects today, although we may be well placed as potential reformers of time-based practices, it could be argued that we have been too timid in responding to the omission of thoughtful timespans in our work, or rather that we have lacked the means to represent the relational dimension of time meaningfully to society at large through our drawing practices. The following sections of the paper describe drawings that sought to relate to the earth, to the sky, to the elements, to atmosphere and to plants in time.

Drawing the sky, light and shadows in time
As light hits a landscape, it manifests in infinite ways. Sometimes it forms voluminous shapes that exist only fleetingly. The form of light changes as time moves forward and it has an inextricable relationship with landscape and with weather. The weather is dynamic, always unfolding, ever changing in its currents, qualities of light and shade, and colours, alternately damp or dry, warm or cold and so on. In this world the earth, far from providing a solid foundation for existence, appears to float like a fragile and ephemeral raft, woven from the strands of terrestrial life, and suspended in the great sphere of the sky. (Ingold, 2011 p. 73) The structure of An t-Eilean was designed as a roofless box to hold light, shadow and colour and to make manifest changes in the weather from dawn, through twilight and into sundown. The way in which shadows grow and retract and finally dissolve into the night during twilight would find a presence in the space. Many of us may have been moved and captivated by artists who work with light, but it would be rare to hear a landscape architect talk directly to working with light and it would be difficult to cite representations. As the exercise of designing the volumes, absences and forms of An t-Eilean's walls progressed inspiration was sought as to the way in which light and time might co-relate through studying the work of artists in the California Light and Space movement, specifically J. Anthony McCall and his silver print image, Room with Altered Window (Fig. 7). Taking inspiration from McCalls' image, a slot was designed along the base of the eastern wall, running the length of An t-Eilean. It is with no regret that the majority of the project fee awarded to the commission was spent making this feature work structurally.2 Light from the east, captivating and unusual in the Highlands of Scotland, now ebbs up into the internal space through this slot (Fig. 6). At sundown, from outside An t-Eilean, light becomes a glowing absence along the floating eastern wall (Fig. 8). Illustrating that this characteristic has not been artificially manipulated and that no artificial lights are on inside the space, a glow of fleeting orange announces twilight's presence to the external world. 2 I hired my own Edinburgh-based structural engineer Tim Heatherington to work with me on some of the more complex intentions of An t-Eilean. The large multi-disciplinary 'official' engineering practice within the wider project team for the campus had told me that the eastern wall slot was not possible. The simple line drawings below (Fig. 9) represent sequential studies of light and shadow on the west-facing wall of An t-Eilean as the sun moves in the sky from the east to the west, lighting different parts of the structure. The drawings were made to experiment with the potential of ambient light conditions as light flowed through the southern entrance portal and to chart the changing consequences for the viewer inside the space through drawing in time. The selection of concrete as a material is attributable to the dependence of the concept on having a flat, uniform and lightly toned backdrop as a canvas to capture the qualities and movement of light. At sunrise in December light casts a blurred shadow of the Scots pine through the south entrance portal. A zig-zag cast by the columns forms in the morning light; the Scots pine breaks this line. The shape of the south portal is projected across the space in a thick fuzzy line that stands in contrast to the sharpness of the north portal. At 11 a.m. the zig-zag line of the columns spans outwards; the tree shadow oscillates around the north portal. On a September morning the pleated concrete creates a darkened replica of its form in shadow and thus the pleats dominate the space. The north portal is cut in half diagonally by the shadow projecting from the corner of the space. By 2 p.m. the shadows of the columns move across the floor of the gallery and the north portal appears to sink deeper into its concrete setting.
The images below (Fig. 10) represent the accurate positioning of shadows for 15 December 2021. In order to express the potential of winter sunlight in bringing the space to life, it was not considered enough to represent the mere dimensions and proportions of shadows. Therefore representations anticipating the way the spaces might transform and indeed the way shadows may bring colour and warmth to An t-Eilean were layered in. Shadows became rationalized once the outlines of their projections were determined geometrically. Eventually, the human experience of a world given, literally, by virtue of shadows -vibrant, imprecise, colourful and complex, resistant to geometric reductions because of diffraction -was relegated to the doubtful realm of subjectivity. (Perez-Gomez & Pelletier, 2000, p. 149) The intention was to communicate the contradictory and unexpected occurrences inherent to working with the sky and with falling and rising darkness through time. In his book on twilight, the Scottish writer Peter Davidson describes our relationship to the lingering light of the day, noting that "the absolute adjustment of the eye to all phenomena of light can compensate and adjust what is perceived to a remarkable extent -an idea that sets up a tension between the claims of painting and photographs of twilight to represent justly what is seen as opposed to what may objectively be present" (Davidson, 2015 p. 24). The four images below were deliberately rendered to evoke a degree of uncanniness, generating a level of atmospheric uncertainty that would call on An t-Eilean's visitor to be alert to the power of their surroundings and thus consider them with deeper contemplation.

Considering planting "in time"
In the January chapter of Wood and Garden, Gertrude Jekyll writes of a day of thin mist; just enough to make a background of tender blue mystery three hundred yards away and to show any defect in the groupings of near trees. No day could be better for deciding which trees are to come down; there is not too much at a time within sight, just one good picture-full and no more. (Jekyll, 1981, p. 23) In many ways, space-time configurations in planting are somewhat predictable. If we are accustomed to working in a particular location, we will be able to make general assumptions about growth rates and flowering durations and the carrying out of key maintenance interventions so that our design intentions are fulfilled. The quote from Gertrude Jekyll above opens up another important consideration of time, however: the potential interrelations between plants and the highly variable atmospheres that may share space with them or manifest around and through them. Jekyll in this statement captures in words a chance occurrence in time where the landscape reveals something to her. It is an alluring example of how decisions about planting and its maintenance may benefit from a wider acceptance of indeterminacy and be undertaken with patience and an open mind. In the context of this article, I see drawing as offering an important extension to this way of thinking. Apart from the Pinus sylvestris positioned in the centre of An t-Eilean, the other plant species in the project are grasses. Grasses to inhabit the north and south shelves of An t-Eilean (Fig. 3) were chosen for the qualities of their durational switches through the seasons: from vigorous sky-surging green in spring to yellow blurs and hazes flushed with red in late summer, to the transparent golden veils they create in a border arrangement in the winter. Figure 11 was drawn in 2011. As in Figure 1, drawn at a similar time and described above, it was my intention to represent a space attendant to time. At this stage of the project, I proposed two concrete castings in the northern wall that made associations with time.
The square casting on the right is suggestive of An t-Eilean's intention as a space to draw in the four seasons. The casting on the left demarcates different intended constituent mixes in the concrete that would weather at different times, so that the banding intensifies in contrast over time. Neither of these features made it to construction, overruled in terms of additional time, challenge and cost for the contractor to implement on site. Planting was intended to generate a textured "veil" in front of this wall. Figure 12 is a photograph of the grasses on the north shelf of An t-Eilean at full height and in full girth in September 2016 before they began to fade back in the winter. Figure 13 below, illustrates the way in which the planting design was initially considered in a matrixed sketch elevation. The larger grids in square intervals of 200mm and the smaller grids (for smaller plants with finer details) drawn in grids of 100mm. Once the grasses were selected for their form, structure and seasonal interest they were separated into the positional layers of the border. The drawings show plants in one season, at their full height in late summer. They evidence a predominance of consideration for form and structure which I now consider a failing in the way that I was using drawing to test the selection of species. Planting requires a complex plurality in terms of design approach, which I experimented with after the project was complete. The failing in the image below is that the vital association between plants and sky, with their backdrop, with light and shadow, is here overlooked. The drawings in Figure 13 were superseded in my personal catalogue of the project by the new drawings below in Figures 14 and 15. By "personal catalogue", I mean the drawings that I feel "hold true" or hold lessons in terms of the way in which I might approach design problems in the future. In Figure 14 and Figure  15 I was retrospectively interested in the way in which details of the grasses' inflorescence, panicles, spikes and racemes appear out of the blur holds much relational potential for the viewer and consequently demanded to be represented beyond a diagram. The studies of Deschampsia cespitosa 'Schottland' in Figure 15 examine the switch in the flowering character of the plant and the consequential change to the way in which it engages with its immediate atmosphere and conditions of light. In delivering the project for construction I did not consider making these drawings because I felt my client would not have understood the ambiguity and abstraction inherent in the drawing approach. As I wrote in the introduction, I felt bound by professional activities that were accepted as "actualizing". This tension highlights a challenge that we face in the representation of planting in time. How do we communicate clearly so that our ideas can be fulfilled on site and yet also represent more anticipatory and relational associations to our clients and stakeholders so that they can better understand a landscape's unfolding in time? If we return to Jekyll's words above, we find guidance and meaning as to how we might draw planting in and through time. In Landscape Architecture our representations of planting tend to lack communication of associative volume and are still predominantly presented in plan with little representation of the durational and relational switches that occur as the year transitions through the seasons. This missed opportunity is difficult to comprehend as making a planting plan necessitates careful thought as to the emergent and associative patterns of growth and decline that occur both in the plant itself and in the immediate patch of earth and sky that the plant inhabits. Figure 16 illustrates studies of the grass borders that seek to represent interactions with the ground and sky. Planting arrangements, even when composed of a single or limited numbers of species, are dynamic and ever-changing and it is this cyclical mutability that makes designing with plants so endlessly fascinating. Plants have an inextricable relationship with the environment that unfolds and refolds through time, just as humans do. The scale of this relationship is intimate, and highly discernible. Therefore as designers we can take small but attentive steps in representing the opportunity to draw in time.
With a different intention for the way in which planting would contribute to An t-Eilean, the Pinus sylvestris situated in the centre of the space was chosen to introduce a very significant presence that could be further intensified through the mirroring of its shadow onto the concrete walls (Fig. 9). What these drawings do not capture, however, is the way in which Pinus sylvestris will drop twisted needles of three to eight centimetres onto the splintered stone floor 3 . The significance of this is that the needles will deaden and muffle the sounds of the space as the years go on. The representation of the idea in a drawing is an activity that I intend to revisit in the future.

Conclusion
To nourish design's potential for the transitions, however, requires a significant reorientation of design from the functionalist, rationalistic and industrial traditions from which it emerged, and within which it still functions with ease, towards a type of rationality and set of practices attuned to the relational dimensions of life. (Escobar, 2018, Preface p. x) In this paper I have sought to offer a series of open reflections on the significance of time in a built project and to explore accepted and experimental ways of drawing that might allow us to bring time and the relational into a meaningful union. The reflections seek to embed practice on the ground into the theoretical context of calls such as Escobar's (2018) to reorientate our practices towards the relational dimensions of life or to Ingold's (2011) to be alive to what is going on in the world around us.
Those of us who design and conceive of projects in the landscape encounter proximity to the earth in ways that require us to situate our judgements very directly in and of the earth. In revisiting and making new drawings I have sought to carefully register that proximity but also look beyond it to understand more about the way in which time might meaningfully manifest "through" the drawing in a form that is perceivable and registerable. I have come to understand, through considerations of the representation of sky, light, shadow and planting, that drawing can help us to manifest time's "affectiveness", where we are attentive to the meaning of "affect" as an alteration, a change or an influence. Time in the landscape is never an ending. The act of drawing, from the moment the mark-making device touches the paper is similarly an open process that often grows out of itself, responsive, iterative, self-generating, involving tens or even hundreds of tiny, internalized decisions happening in the mind of the illustrator as the drawing grows, many of them intuitive and beyond conscious thought.
Making a landscape, as we learn from Gertrude Jekyll, deserves a similar openness to the processes of our own "involvement" with the landscape as it evolves in space and time. This necessary involvement cannot be oversimplified by including a rote timeline at the base of a drawing. This would degrade the opportunity of what it means to draw in time. The opportunity is rather embedded in growing knowledge about the landscape through a multi-dimensional involvement with "thinking in time" that oscillates between analysis and knowledge of an existing place, the materialization of new landscape conditions and the pictorial processes that we engage to register the prospect of change.
Making a drawing that successfully talks of time will have necessarily developed a sense of "affectuality" in the designer -cause, affect, effect fluctuating in the thinking approach as ideas are translated to paper. Receiving a drawing that successfully talks of time, will have an affective influence upon the person that receives it, leaving space for them to interpret it through their own subjectivity. To put it simply, the conclusion to this paper is that time can be given form and content through the making of drawings that are unafraid to harbour both the disposition and influence of time in the landscape. This means taking care as to the way in which drawn arrangements are made between visible and non-visible entities in the environment that sustain the planet, and the tensions and unions that exist between them as they form and subside in time.
As a consequence of writing this paper, these considerations will now always flow through the conceptual underpinnings of the way in which I approach a site. Not necessarily to change it but also as a means to record and understand what is already there that I may have failed to notice. I endeavour to continue to look for something "else" in the landscape by making drawings that consider the way in which time manifests, and in doing so, challenge my own regular lapses into obliviousness to the beauty and fragility of the world around me as I go about my everyday life. I will harbour hope in acknowledging that across the spectrum of disciplines tasked with attending to our external world, it is perhaps our inherent sensitivity as Landscape Architects to cyclical time and our capacity to relate to the environment that brings us up close to a sense of what could be done, through drawing, on the ground and through time in the planetary crisis.