SPOOL

Drawing Time

Saskia de Wit — 2022-09-01

This issue of Spool – ‘Drawing Time’ – departs from the observation that the metropolitan landscape is subject to time, in many ways. The metropolitan landscape, as it has been studied in Spool over the years, is conceived as the interrelation between urban, infrastructural, rural and natural formations: a dynamic, intertwined and layered urban-landscape structure. The urban condition is viewed from the perspective of the landscape as a permanent underlying substructure and as physical open space with its own spatial, compositional and perceptual characteristics. Time aspects of the metropolitan landscape can be found in processes of growth and decay, seasonal manifestations, disruptive forces of wind and water and also in the ways in which humans inhabit and use space or in which urban development processes take place. Designing for the metropolitan landscape means dealing with a wide range of dynamic phenomena, unstable systems and variable conditions. It implies the exploration of future situations, bridging time spans from seasons to decades and design tasks from small-scale interventions to large-scale strategies. It connects landscape operations that build upon the garden, the park and the forest to complex, layered design strategies for transformation, migration and climate change. This Spool issue discusses the importance of time in such design processes, and its reciprocal relation to representation.

Captured Moments of Landscape Metamorphosis

Valentina Schmitzer — 2022-09-01

Landscape architecture students at the University of Ljubljana were encouraged to prepare temporal series of landscape and plant drawings to sharpen their sensitivity to changes in the perception of a land motive and vegetation morphology. Students chose a particular motive, defined the frame of the drawing, and identified characteristic plants on site. The motives were sketched several times during the year to portray seasonal changes. Specific environmental conditions (fog, rain, sunny day) were captured in drawings, and in the case of plants, drawings revealed the transitions of selected physiological events (budding, flowering, fruiting). These transformations were discussed in connection with landscape perception and as a tool in the design process.

Time Drawing as a Key Practice for Beginners in Landscape Architecture

Luis Maldonado — 2022-09-01

The subject matter of the Landscape Expression course for students starting the master’s degree in landscape architecture at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia in Barcelona is the dynamic representation of landscape. Its objective is to introduce new students to changing and temporal aspects of the problem of its graphic representation.

In our case, few of the students have previous landscape architecture training. Most of them come from disciplines dealing with spatial development or space, such as architecture or engineering. Others come from fields of knowledge related to biology or the environment and are not used to design and the need to graphically communicate that it implies. The course confronts students with the contradiction between landscape – diverse and dynamic – and our flat and static representations.

Cross-scale drawings of hidden landscape dynamics

Tomaž Pipan — 2022-09-01

The question of how to show processes that are by definition time-based has been one of the more intriguing ones in the field of landscape representation. With ever-greater importance being given to values of space that can be measured, we ask if new approaches to the drawing of space are needed to unveil these measured, sometimes hidden landscapes. With this in mind, students in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Ljubljana undertaking the Visual Communication course were tasked with developing new techniques of data visualization focusing on (1) the spatial dynamics of landscapes and (2) on the multiscalarity of the representations.

The paper comprises a general description and discussion of the topic, accompanied by seven sets of drawings where the two above-mentioned aspects are briefly discussed in the drawings’ captions. The drawings presented here push and question the boundaries of drawing conventions and consequently elicit uncertainty and encourage further enquiry. Exploring new drawing approaches is an important part of revealing contemporary landscapes.

Drawing fixed moments in time

Lotte Oppenhuis — 2022-09-01

This visual essay discusses drawing time in relation to the author’s graduation project, which is based on the paradigm of a multispecies world. Three design principles are derived from this paradigm: movement, hybrid and landscape as being. These relate to different notions of time and thus on drawing time. Movement means drawing the now. Hybrid is a material structure that shows non-human presence. This materiality implies that decay has to be drawn. The landscape as being is the ongoing landscape without end. In order to draw the three principles leading to the design intervention, fixed moments in time are chosen. In this visual essay 0 years, 20 years, and 30 years are shown. Time is drawn through a repetition of plans, sections and animation stills and through drawing specific human and non-human presence. In this way repetition, growth, decay and changing actors are shown. Drawing decay opened up new design possibilities. By comparing the repetitive animation stills, drawing time became a critical tool that showed idealization within the design. This visual essay shows both the repetition of drawings, as well as the discoveries it leads to.

Time Thinking and Drawing in Designing Dynamic River Landscapes

Marijne Beenhakker — 2022-09-01

This visual essay explores the use of time thinking and drawing in the design process of the Ooijen- Wanssum floodplain widening project. Through a series of project sketches, final drawings and photos of the constructed project, the authors reveal the way in which time drawing has (often implicitly) given direction to the design process. The water calendar is introduced as a design tool that integrates time- dependent river dynamics into the design process and thereby informs spatial design choices that are considered in several design sketches. These design choices include interactions with dynamic processes such as erosion, vegetation dynamics and recreational use of the river landscape.

The significance of time in the design of a public landscape

Lisa Mackenzie — 2022-09-01

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.

‘The Future is just around the Corner...’ – The construction of urban narratives through temporary supergraphics

Anne Margrethe Wagner — 2022-09-01

Drawings play various roles in (and in-between) the processes of design, construction and the continuous use and appropriation of space. This article explores large drawing elements positioned at building sites. It discusses how decision makers, developers, planners and design professionals actively use such representational means to create site and project narratives for the site preparation and construction phase. Two projects and sites are presented here in order to illustrate and explore the role of large on- site supergraphics during site transformation. The main aim is to explore how they configure specific conceptions of time. The first is Ōtautahi: An Origin Story, a large comic strip mounted on the hoardings of the building site for a new convention centre in Christchurch, New Zealand, as part of the city’s post- earthquake rebuild. The second case is a ground mural in the Danish town of Køge featuring a map in a section of a temporary urban space called The Space of Time that is part of the town’s harbour transformation. The analysis engages with theoretical perspectives on visual culture, drawing and space – in particular urban comics, cartography, mapping, site thinking and transformation. It sheds light on an emerging phenomenon in contemporary urban culture – one characterized by hybrid authorships, ambiguous aesthetics and time-space constellations.