A Myriad Of Design Approaches

Metaphorical Design 

John Bunyan, in the Pilgrim's Progress, used landscape as a metaphor for life (Bunyan, 1678). The hero, Christian, has a dream in which he learns of his hometown becoming a City of Destruction. This caused him to depart on a pilgrimage through a series of metaphorical landscapes: the Slough of Despond, the Palace Beautiful, the Valley of the Shadow of Death, the Doubting Castle, the Delectable Mountains and the Celestial City. Artists have transformed these images from poetry to pictures. Finding Cities of Destruction all over nineteenth century Europe, idealist planners dreamed of replacing them with Celestial Cities. Then they looked for sites.

The Finger Plan for Copenhagen, a town planning concept, was based on a metaphor and shown by a diagram, of a great hand resting over that city. Since 1947, that great hand has guided Copenhagen's development. The Five Finger Plan was developed in 1947 through the Urban Planning Labratory in collaboration with urban planners Steen Eiler Rasmussen and Christian Erhardt Bredsdorff, focusing on both metropolitan train lines and the green spaces in between. The merchant's harbour, after which the city was named, sits in the palm of a guiding hand. Fingers point ways to new development. Power lines, telecom lines, and rapid transit lines follow the bones, arteries, veins and nerves of the fingers. Between those fingers we find the green land of Denmark. Copenhagen was made into a garden city but the hand itself, of urban development, was grey.

Geometrical metaphors have been important in city planning and regional development. Planners speak of grid cities, radial cities and organic cities, though it is only the street patterns that have these characteristics. The lower part of Holland is seen as a ring city, or randstadt, with a green heart. Transport corridors are seen as growth poles. The benefit of these metaphors arises from the help they give to planners in thinking about large and complicated issues. A city should be so much more than a street pattern; surrounding countryside should be so much more than a 'green' belt. Road plans do not show the city structure; they show one of many structures.

Symbolic Design

Symbolic identity or the designer’s personal discovery of local symbolism is fascinating. Choosing a symbolic identity could be defined as the choice of a symbolic aspect of either a design that seems to be in some way relevant to the location or of local elements that can be interpreted into a new spatial component. Symbolism is an important means for creating place identity and, by this way, closely relates to human needs that contribute to well being. The design of public space is one of the places where symbols of collective identity can be seen in their most clear and compelling form. The symbolic references that provide a design vocabulary for these open spaces speak volumes about the shared values of the group and have often been developed to reinforce people’s identification. Such places include landscapes, monuments and sites where commemorations are performed, collective memory is reinforced and national identity is constructed, both formally and informally. I think the role and responsibility of landscape architects is to shape and reflect the cultural values of a community and reveal the importance of supporting place identity through the design process.

In ode to his grandmother, landscape architect Hung-Yin Yen was requested by his mother to build a memorial that represents the bond between a mother and her child; an infinite loop.

Archetypal Design

After an early attempt to 'computerise' the design process Christopher Alexander concluded that many design problems are so complex and so ancient that they are best resolved by learning from solutions which have proved successful over an endless period. He describes these solutions as 'archetypes' or 'patterns'. They are particularly useful in outdoor design, where patterns are comparatively easy to identify and difficult to explain. How, for example, to people choose their outdoor sitting places? 

Consciously or unconsciously, we seek order out of chaos. We tend to look for patterns which seem to make sense in the knowledge that we have about our world, as well as being aesthetically satisfying in the relationship of each part to the whole. Humans have been making patterns from time immemorial, as decoration, as symbols or for religious purposes. Some patterns can relate to certain cultures whilst others are more universal. People, by their settlements, fields, roads, village layouts and towns have subconsciously evolved the landscape to suit their purposes, although they may not have been fully aware of the patterns being created.

Pattern recognition is important to help us understand and relate to the world around us. We can develop a language of description and analysis to communicate relationships between different patterns, the processes that change the landscape and our aesthetic and emotional responses to them. How we perceive and understand patterns also depends very much on what we are looking for and why. For example, a cultural geographer, a farmer, a forester, a physical planner, an ecologist, an explorer or an army general are likely to describe the pattern of a landscape, based on their own knowledge, experiences and what it provides for them. However, whilst they are all describing the same landscape, containing patterns made from the same components, each person may perceive them rather differently. It is often helpful to compare such descriptions to see what can he deduced from them. If there are sonic fundamental components and arrangements common to each description, then such factors are likely to have a degree of significance. They may he valued for their importance in explaining the pattern, in controlling processes and function, or in giving distinctiveness and a sense of unity to the area. As such they might be used elsewhere, as patterns, in the sense of templates or models, especially for restoring damaged landscapes and for planning and designing landscape change. (Perception and Process, Simon Bell)

Narrative Design

Narrative is a very fundamental way people shape and make sense of experience and landscapes. Stories link the sense of time, event, experience, memory and other intangibles to the more tangible aspects of place. Narratives offer ways of knowing and shap­ing landscapes not typically acknowledged in conventional documentation, mapping, surveys, or even the formal concerns of design. Initially, the use of narrative, grounded in lived experience, seems to offer an alternative to both the abstraction of modernism and the simulations of postmodern culture. However, even the simplest story raises fundamental issues regarding subjectivity, representation, fiction, and what is taken to be real. The experiences of each character in a story, for instance, introduce shifts in focus and meaning that revise and remap the landscape. It is important to ask whose story is told and why? What systems of belief are established through stories? How does one sort out the many layered (personal, ethnic, regional) and often contested stories of a place? What are the ethics and politics of telling stories?

In memory of those aggrieved in the seventeenth-century Finnmark Witchcraft Trials, the Steilneset Memorial, landscape architect Peter Zumthor, rests along the spiked coastline of the Barents Sea in Vardo Norway. Zumthor portrays venture as a point and as a line. The line belongs to the architect while the dot belongs to the artist Louise Bourgeois, a collaboration of ideas. According to him, the art installation talks about burning and aggression, and the building is about feelings about life and emotions.

Geometric Design

The concept of line is one of the simplest and most elegant of design tools. Primarily used as a basic ordering system, the line typically evolves into a series of other forms to create a compositional whole. We tend to think of line as a journey, the creation of, not only form, but connection from one point, one place to another. The line is an endlessly hardworking, playful, functional, and beautiful form, from with which anything can be designed. The line is completely manageable and comprehensible, easily ordering space and providing human orientation to both the natural and built worlds. Conceptually, design studies begin with a series of gestural lines, as a means of ordering space, identify centrelines and sight lines, emanating from the architecture, then beginning to reimagine the site and create connections from one point to another and from one place to another, identifying focal points, boundaries and even the lines of the sun’s axis. As the design evolves, the actual form varies and expands. One of the most interesting aspects of the line in design is the power that it gains when it is repeated. The repeating line pattern offers so much opportunity to interpret and express ideas of material, volume, and dimension.  These elements may be repeated, staggered, shifted and offset, narrowed, or widened, all of which create variety and interest.

62 Degrees by Arterra Landscape Architects