Exploring a looping path - a design art practice in landscape architecture

摘要

The research undertaken in this PhD has entailed the close scrutiny of a personal design method that has propelled more than twenty years of design/art practice in landscape architecture. The original research through typological models gave way to a more specific understanding of my design methodology as one that loops around diverse references, operations and site qualities. It is a method that explores a variety of divergent ideas through drawing, one that loops between different positions, pursuing new directions as they reveal themselves, retreating, revisiting and testing options against project realities and my imagined mentors. The looping method is as much a process of elimination as it is of selection. This PhD has brought to light the importance of my sketchbooks as the site of my design research and methodology, and has given them a central position in my practice. It is here that the looping method makes itself evident and reveals a number of recurrent operations that are used to engage with, manipulate, heighten, reinforce, ennoble and or challenge context. This research implicitly builds an argument for an approach to the sites of landscape architecture that celebrates the particular and embraces the discontinuities, missed beats and contradictions of sites as they are here and now.