Surfacing: a guide for approaching landscape

Abstract

This work is a compilation of ideas intended as a framework for an alternative approach to engaging ‘site’ in the design process, an approach that maintains and explores the complexities and subtleties of a landscape, of a place.

Through two parallel explorations - one that considers an expanded and inclusive interpretation of landscape as the frame through which we engage with, and design, our surroundings, and one that examines the specific nature of this engagement as exchange between the self and the milieu - such an approach has been developed.

This approach is called RECONNAISSANCE. Through encouragement of explicit, conscious consideration of how we perceive and experience a landscape, how this contributes to an understanding of a particular place and how this relates to and informs the practice of landscape architecture (both the process and the outcome), RECONNAISSANCE contributes to a strengthening of our abilities and actions as landscape architects.