MATERIAL PRACTICES
KATHERINE JENKINS Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture jenkins.1060@osu.edu www.presentpractice.com
STACKWELL
INSTALLATION AT OVERLOOK FARM PENNSYLVANIA, JULY 2017 Materials that are transitioning from one form to another are often classified as waste. Waste, understood as such, is unstable, mutable, and asymmetric. This sculpture, built of manifold layered rings of plaster, exists in a state of non-equilibrium: after rising stack-like in a meadow it was dismantled and assumed a second form. The work draws on the industrial forms (the smokestack), textures (slate), and topographies (slag heaps of rock and coal) of local waste landscapes in Northeastern Pennsylvania.
This project was completed while Present Practice was in residence at the Overlook Field School.
GREAT BASIN EXERCISES
CENTER FOR LAND USE INTERPRETATION RESIDENCY, UTAH, JUNE 2015 This work explores how perception informs land-use through a series of installations in the deserts of Nevada and Utah. It argues that the aesthetics of the Great Salt Lake Desert, a place often described as banal, empty, and static, may help to explain its patterns of development. The first installation, Exframe, short for “extra-framing device,� is comprised of four 10x10 foot incisions in the ground plane of the desert. The purpose of these incisions is to animate not within, but external to the space they occupy. The square frame is interior; the picture: everything around it. While the incision of the orthogonal square provides a point of control, the placement of the square in the desert invites chance to act upon it. The erosion and eventual dissolution of the square makes visible the weathering forces of the desert, but also, importantly, incorporates them as a creative force in the design.
This work was published in the peer-reviewed journal ARID in 2015.
SAGE GRID The Sage Grid installation (previous) uproots and replants existing sage into a square grid of 25, altering the relative position of each plant but not the type or overall number. The regular intervals of the grid are immediately recognizable within the larger, chaotic, field. It is a reminder that new elements need not be introduced to a site to provide a new means of seeing it. This break in the desert schema is, moreover, an anthropic mutation of the existing organization of plants at each site. Having this quality, they are further distinguished in the visual field, becoming orienting devices, or landmarks.
TARP The tarp installations (right) purposefully isolate one or two elements in the landscape. This act - a devolution from field to object edits repeat specimens, revealing the variety and individuality of each sage, flower, or mineral occurrence. Isolated specimens become characters. Through the process of subtraction we see less, and subsequently more; by conferring greater value on each object in the field, the cumulative value of the field is enhanced.
MEADOW LINES RESTORED MEADOW AND PATH SYSTEM OHIO, 2018-PRESENT
This research examines the connections between walking, drawing and designing: the ways in which each delineates territory, modifies land and leaves traces. I practice walking as a form of drawing. I walk a landscape repeatedly, in various seasons and conditions, and record my movements via GPS. Upon returning to the studio I reconstruct the itinerary of each walk from its set of corresponding coordinates. Collected over time, the accretion of these digital threads form a mesh of overlapping lines and knots: a site plan of my movements through the landscape. The accumulation of geospatial data provides a script for intervening on the site. Using a one-acre test site in Columbus, Ohio I have recorded, visualized, and acted on the landscape by walking it routinely for one year.
This research was published in the Journal of Landscape Architecture in 2016 and 2018, was awarded a $15,000 grant through the OSU Sustainability Fund and will be exhibited at the University of Oregon’s Center for Art Research in October 2019.
EPHEMERAL PATHS The creation of paths through my test site and adjacent agricultural fields provides an immersive experience of the landscape that changes seasonally as new paths emerge (via mowing, seeding, and clearing) and old paths recede (as they grow over). (Top right) A designed cut through a corn field meets a cut in the meadow, August 2019.
DIGITAL THREADS The shape of each walk is a product of the environmental and spatial conditions encountered by the designer, and, as such, contains detailed information about the site. A line’s looping, serpentine, zigzag, wavering or smooth form instruct the designer on the condition of the ground, the ease or difficulty of navigation, the presence of roads and even topographic variation. (Bottom right) This drawing is a site plan of my movements through the landscape around my test site, December 2018 - April 2019.
SITE DRAWING DRAWING AS RESEARCH NY / PA / OH, 2015-PRESENT
Drawing on-site is fundamental to my design process, A drawing of thirty feet in length (right) executed directly in the field is a visual synthesis of information absorbed and interpreted through the body in space. The logistics of construction—drawing at dimensions many times those of the body whilst navigating the environmental and material forces of the site—generate a complex surface that retains both physical traces of the landscape and temporal indicators of the designer’s movement as she interprets her surroundings. The drawing is, thus, both a medium through which to engage the site and a record of that engagement.
Selected drawings were published in LA+ in 2018 and were exhibited at the James River Association in 2019. New research and drawings are forthcoming in the Journal of Landscape Architecture (fall 2019) and in Fieldwork in Landscape Architecture: Methods Actions Tools (fall 2020).
THE TRANS-ALASKA TRAIL RECREATIONAL TRAIL DESIGN PROPOSAL ALASKA, 2014 - PRESENT
The rapidly transforming Arctic landscape of Alaska is host to an extraordinary coupling of mega-infrastructure and shifting terrain. The Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS), an 800-mile seam stretching from the oil town of Prudhoe Bay to the major port of Valdez, Alaska, must adapt to acute changes in the environment as it moves over and under a gradient of permafrost, the Yukon River, the Denali Fault, the Brooks Mountain Range, and paths of caribou migration. Each of these instances requires specialized design: unique forms for offing excess heat, traversing frozen rivers, and negotiating seismic zones. The diversity of constructed forms expressed in this singular pipeline is a reflection of the fluctuating, and often severe, conditions surrounding it. In this way, the TAPS serves a second function as an index for measuring the powerful and variegated Arctic environment. Present Practice traveled to Alaska in 2014 and 2017 to study the distinct architectural typologies of the TAPS as it responds to warming atmospheres and new ecological conditions.
TYPOLOGICAL STUDY
THE TRAIL
In collaboration with the office of Representative Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins, AK-35
The Trans-Alaska Trail (TAT) is an oceanto-ocean multi-use trail spanning 800 miles across Alaska, from Arctic Ocean to Pacific tidewater, from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez. The elegance of the Trans-Alaska Trail, is that, in a sense, it already exists: the pipeline is an orienting device; the maintenance corridor a path. To view it as such, however, requires a perspectival shift. A gravel path traverses Alaska from the Arctic Ocean to the Pacific. This service pad, a basic 4x4 track, follows the route of the TransAlaska Pipeline and is used to maintain the pipeline infrastructure. The TAT will make use of the pipeline’s existing infrastructure to provide access to remote and previously inaccessible land in Alaska’s interior and Arctic territories.
This work was presented at the American Society of Landscape Architects annual conference twice (2014 and 2017), was published in the Site Magazine (“Oil Lines” 2016) and was awarded an $8,000 travel and research grant from SERC.
TEACHING OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY 2016 - PRESENT CORNELL UNIVERSITY, 2015 - 2016
My teaching methodology is directly informed by my research and practice and prioritizes physical modeling, material exploration, and site analysis in the field. My approach deemphasizes a program-centered design ethic and reasserts landscape architecture’s role in shaping how we see and experience space. My intent is to expand the space of interaction of the design studio to encourage students to engage with real materials, atmospheres, and scales of the landscape. (Right) Graduate students visit the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center at OSU in 2018 to study Arctic sediment core samples and fossils.
LARCH 7940: THE ARCTIC ENTROPIC ADVANCED GRADUATE STUDIO CO-TAUGHT WITH PARKER SUTTON, OSU 2018
This advanced graduate studio examines entropic changes that are radically altering the Alaskan Arctic, including severe coastal erosion, thinning sea ice, melting permafrost, the exhaustion of Arctic oil and gas fields, the rapid release of methane gas and the loss of unique landscapes such as Arctic tundra due to atmospheric warming. Entropic change refers to an alteration that cannot be reversed. The Alaskan Arctic, defined socially and economically by resource extraction, typifies this—oil cannot be put back into the ground, permafrost cannot be reconstituted once thawed. Students study the cold weather entropic processes transforming the grounds around Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, hypothesize about the environments that will replace them, and make proposals for future land use within such speculative hybrid landscapes. The studio also considers what conservation means in an era when boundary lines on a map are growing irrelevant and warming air, not terrestrial activity, is driving landscape change.
LARCH 4970: THE ARTIFICIAL MOUNTAIN ADVANCED UNDERGRADUATE STUDIO OSU 2019
This studio investigates the sculptural, material, and biotic qualities of the landfill. Students examine the landfill as a novel ecological habitat, a monument, and a burial ground. With the staggering quantity of material entering a present-day landfill, they are pregnant with as-yet unimagined design potential. The afterlife of any landfill far exceeds its active period, but efficient design privileges a landfill’s comparatively brief term of construction. It is increasingly worth asking, given the heretofore unseen opportunities for earthmolding that modern landfills present, what new morphologies might emerge if landscape architects designed waste-sites from nascency? How can landscape architects reshape landfill construction to create a more culturally resonant and aestheticallyminded terrain?
T R A C K - T Y P E LO A D E R
Z I G G U R AT ARCHAEOLOGIC
OPERATIVE Perimeter 36.61 meters
Temple 5826
move up & down 110 degree
5236
Water Outlet
6 ft 11 in_2.12 m - 6ft 4.11 in_ 1934 mm
Central Temple
Main Portal
25 Area: 106.63 square meters
91.4 in_
2.3 m -
115 in_
2.9 m
18.9
m-
80 m
in_4
21.6
in_
Main Staircase
m
55 m
Water Outlet
A track-type loader is an engineering vehicle that consisted of a tracked chassis with a loader that is used for digging and loading material. These vehicles are capable in nearly every task, but master of none. A dozer, excavator, or wheel loader can outperform a Track-Type Loader under a set of conditions. However, it’s ability to perform almost every task on a job site is why it continue to be a part of many companies’ fleets.
The Track-Type Tractor is primarily used to push and spread material during site preparation, build access and haul roads, A and ziggurat rip ground cover and spread compact is a terraced structure built waste and cover material. Cat® thatTrack-Type were part of a larger temple complex Tractors can achieve compaction densities comprised of multiple buildings. These of 800 to 1,000 lb/yd3 (475 to 593 kg/m3) were and have no difficulty working in and built on the by the ancient Akkadians, waste material. These tractors can alsoBabylonians, Eblaites, Elamites Assyrians, move material economically at distances up to 300 feet (91 meters). and Sumerians for religious purposes.
Because of its versatility, the Track-Type Tractor is the most popular machine on a landfill and often the first machine selected.
The main application of the track-type to seven. Terraces gradually loader is pushing, spreading, handling they decended upwards. The cover material.
OPERATIVE
have had astrological significan also tended to have their names on these glazed bricks.
ARCHAEOLOGIC
The number of floors ranged from two receded as top of the structures had the main temple, which only
1 Caterpillar Performance Handbook. Peoria, Illinois: Caterpillar Tractor Company. Serial
The ziggurat in comparison to a la relate to how the material that the structures are made of a co of adobe and fired bricks. The overtime would give away and the would collapse, similar to what
STEPPE GEOLOGIC Summer
DDRRY Y- M - MEEAAD ECOLOGIC ECOLOGIC
Winter
Native: Solidago Native: Solidago juncea juncea Invasive:Invasive: Centaurea Centaurea maculosa maculosa F
A dry-meadow A dry-meadow is an is upland an upland ecosystem ecosystem Because Because dry-mea dr
Steppe is an ecoregion, in the montane a desert. The soil is typically of chernozem locatedlocated on infertile, on infertile, nutrient-poor nutrient-poor soil. soil. grasses grasses and flowe and asslands and shrublands and temperate type. asslands, savannas and shrublands It is usually characterized by a semi-arid Theyorare They found are near foundrocky near summits, rocky summits, utility utility other meadow other mead ha ECOLOGIC mes. It can be characterizedGEOLOGIC by continental climate. The temperature can corridors, corridors, railroad railroad embankments, embankments, and and to identify to identify a dry assland plains without trees apart from be up to 45 °C (113 °F) in the summer and other other environments where where ruderalruderal speciesspecies habitat.habitat. Some pla Som se near rivers and lakes. A steppe may down to −55 °C (−67 °F) in the winter. Theenvironments 1 1 semi-arid or covered with grass or differences in temperature between day would would thrive. thrive. the habitat the habitat being rubs or both, depending on the season and night are also very great. For example, the following: the followin Dew d latitude. It can also be used to denote in the highlands of Mongolia, 30 °C (86 °F) Dry-meadows are differentiated are differentiated from from Yarrow,Yarrow, Spotted Spo Kn climate encountered in regions too dry can be reached during the day with sub- Dry-meadows support a forest but not dry enough to be zero °C (sub 32 °F) during the night. other meadow other meadow habitats habitats or isolated or isolated fields fields Wild Strawberry Wild Strawb an
LARCH 6940: SITE INTINERARIES ADVANCED SEMINAR, CORNELL 2016
This advanced seminar, taught first at Cornell and reinvented at OSU, investigates the interdependencies of walking and drawing—the relationship between gesture and surface, mark and medium. Students undertake extensive hand drawing and walking exercises that generate novel methods of interpreting and shaping the landscape. (Right) Students use a weather balloon and GPS to map their walks spatially and temporally. (Next page) Students work on a thirty-foot transect drawing at the edge of Cayuga Lake in Ithaca, New York. Multiple interpretations, styles, interests, and techniques are represented in one large composite image that catalogues a length of ground. This is not a perspectival drawing with a linear narrative, but a plurality of overlapping and fragmented views.
50
60 40
30
20
10
KATHERINE JENKINS Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture jenkins.1060@osu.edu www.presentpractice.com