Music & Landscape by malda

Music as a tool for Landscape architecture for healthier cities

OVERVIEW OF RESEARCH-DESIGN COLLABORATION & TOPIC

Research through this quarter helped me a lot in defining my interest and transforming my ideas to something that can be valuable in the real world, and to a thesis. Through this course I am trying to understand how my thoughts and feeling about the power of music can be translated into landscape design in a way that can better contribute to the health of cities.

Doing research on my particular area of focus helped me in the process of decid-

ing on my research questions and organizing my interests to things that can be researchable.

Landscape architecture is a field that immerses and contributes to the social, cultural and historical aspects of life. Moreover, it can play an important role in preforming the ecological functions- for example treating stormwater runoff, saving endangered species, creating better environments for biodiversity, and cleaning the air and many otherthough in the same time thinking of the social needs and demands. To add to all of that, landscape architecture can have political and economic effects. Thus, research is essential for landscape architecture to better preform. Moreover, research can be a great tool to measure the performance of this field. And because of its wide affects, the research of other disciplines â&#x20AC;&#x201C;such as public policy, social science, engineering, medicine, Law, architecture, ecology and many other- can be a great help for landscape architecture and

important educational and research resources for its progresses. For example Post-occupancy evaluation (POE) method can helps landscape architecture in creating better understanding of the performance of previous finished landscape architecture projects. POE can also create a great archival data base for landscape architects to test their design projects before moving to the construction phases and to the evaluation of their assumptions. Not only POE for landscape architecture projects can be valuable in this field but also POE that happened in other fields can help landscape architects to understand the performance of people in specific setting, the performance of a particular species in an environment, and some POE can help Landscape architects to learn about the ecological efficiency of particular plants that being evaluated previouslyâ&#x20AC;Śetc.â&#x20AC;Ś POE can both benefit a specific project and contribute to more general knowledge base of lessons learned ( preiser et al., 1988; shibley, 1982; zimring, 1981). Practicing the Post-occupancy evaluation to the landscape architecture projects can contribute a lot to the evolution of this field, and can be a great educational lessons learned method. As Zimiring, C. discussed

In a book titled Handbook of environmental psychology that in order to create the

appropriate conditions for learning through POE a direct participation in evaluations and the process of analyzing and writing up the results of an evaluation can help decision makers reflect on the implications of the results and make links to their own practice.

My thesis goal is to examine and suggest ways to design healthier places in order to create healthier and more sustainable cities. I believe that POE studies conducted on green existing projects can be a great measured data that would help my research. Through those

studies I’m aiming to better understand the elements that compose spaces in urban cities and as consequence develop a toolkit of keys that support and contribute to the process of creating healthy urban places and keys that distract from that. I believe that this process would help me better understand the fabric of cities’ composition (in my case would be the city of Seattle) and would make me understand and listen to the symphony that those keys are creating in the cities’ landscape.

Being able to listen to this

symphony and understand its composition, I anticipate, would help me better use the music composition’s theory to harmonically build a setting for designing healthier and more sustainable places in cities. tle, a city in the United

To achieve that and since my thesis going to be in Seat-

states

I’m going to look at the SITES Pilot Projects that

represent the Sustainable Site Initiative: Guidelines and Performance Benchmarks 2009 and find the feedback from these Pilot Program. What would be very important too is to examine the SITES V2 that the Sustainable Site Initiative is going to release this year, which would be based on the feedback from the Pilot Program. . Examining the evaluations of the Pilot program would provide important knowledge for the toolkit that I’m

going to build and would enable me to develop a stronger understanding of what element of the sustainable deign in city work and what are the lessons learned from other elements. In addition, my Plan is to contact some landscape architecture companies in Seattle that are known of their research practices and ask them about the documents that present the evaluation results of some projects that they have done. Having this opportunity would also make my toolkit more affluent and make me

develop a richer understanding about how designed sites preform in urban context. For example, some of those companies that I will try to contact are forterra, Sightline ,

Jones

& Jones, Berger Partnership, Mithun. Examining and learned from their lessons learned information that they got form their POE studies would allowed me to develop a clearer modules for my toolkit that would act as advice setting for me to develop clearer understand of how sustainable city should look like? What are the elements that contribute in building a healthier spaces in a city? And what are the properties of the city that support a sustainable social, economic, and environmental mix? City of Seattle the office of sustainability and environment, the office of Planning and development and the office of park and recreation might have done a lot of POE research which would also be a great resource for my thesis.

POE can be a great tool and important thing, as I said before, in testing the designer assumptions but I think that POE should be supported with other research methods to keep the designed projects up to date with the present conditions of the particular project that they are handling. Moreover, each project has a specific criteria and located in specific settings that effect the results in a different way from what a POE for other project might be presenting. One of the way that would support the POE methods

is the Community

participation in the design decisions approach which can have great benefits for both the designers and the community. It can open up the communityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s members to new approaches in design and in the same time it can help the designers understand how the potential design site has been used, what the place mean for daily users, and what they like and dislike about it? And why they like and dislike things in the site? Moreover, this approach would help create a sense of stewardship in the community for their own spaces.

Community Building approach can be very important approach for the designers to

conduct, but there is a more engaging and interesting approach, which would reveal a better understanding for the environment of the site that the planners and designers are planning to design, this approach is the participatory action research. In this approach the researchers and the community work together in order to search for solutions relating to the exciting setting of the environment where the participation process is happening. Being on the site with the residents who use it would create a very rich understanding for what the site and people who are using it need.

MY THESIS TOPIC

Through my thesis Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m going to research and investigate how music can be a source of inspiration? For landscape architecture to create cities that can inform urban development in a more environmentally sensitive way.

How can we as landscape architects be inspired

from music in framing our design decisions to harmonically integrate the social and nature layers of the environment together to form healthier and more sustainable cities? And I am curious to investigate, if that will be something feasible, whether Music can help landscape architects in measuring and anticipating how much our places in cities are sustainable?

I pursued landscape architecture because of its abilities to infuse life into public spaces and make cities more livable. The more I learn about Landscape Architecture, the more I feel a sense of responsibility toward the places I inhabit and the environment. During the past two years, I have been introduced to many social and environmental issues that we Landscape Architects need to address.

I came across many design projects that

challenged me to research and understand complicated layers about a site and identify a solution that integrates all these layers. I feel that my education is laying the foundation for my thesis and will help me further develop my views, design philosophy and values, which in turn will push me forward to create forward,

sustainable, harmonious

spaces and participate in the evolution of life.

We are in an era when there is a need for preservation and development. And my biggest questions are how we can as landscape architects create the balance between those two needs? How landscape architecture can preforms the healthy ecological process in the citiesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; urban fabric?

And how that would save and remediate the life for people and the

ecosystem in general? Soon Seattle going to go through a rapid period of development with the coming of rail trail. Because of that there would be lots of challenges of how the city is going to accept those new patterns. I believe that we should start to rethink the way cities are functioning now to accommodate the pace of the new dynamic growth. And that we should find and organize harmony between all the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s functions in order to find the ways that make cities healthier for human and all species of the ecosystem. The director of the ministries of environment and energy in France said in a live interview focused on cities and climate change â&#x20AC;&#x153;In developed nations, Like ours, in Europe and

North America, where cities have been already built, we don’t have the ability to that much rethink our cities in an abstract way, by asking what a new city is, but we should find the margins of freedom to change urban life and make that life answer the challenges of sustainable development”.

I think landscape architects should learn to read the settings of the environment, they should understand the landscape of cities to creatively engage with it in an innovative conversation that would balance the growth and create a healthier layout for the new future city and in the same time protect the unique character of them. Dr Kongjian Yu stated that “Landscape architecture is the art of survival and it is an art of integration between “smart preservation” and “smart growth” and it is an art of the wise integration of various natural and cultural

processes of stormwater, and flood, biodiversity, rec-

reation, and aesthetics, on the site and across scales”. And In her book, The Language of Landscape, Spirn wrote “Landscape stories explain the world, define place in it, justify actions, guide behavior, reinforce through experience. Art amplifies the power of these stories make them memorable.”

Anne Whiston Spirn, Kongjian Yu, Roberto Burly Marx, Lawrence Halprin, Garrett Eckbo to name few, believed in the necessity of art to innovate new ideas of integration between human interaction in space and the environment’s needs. Each discovered his or her own way of art to represent ideas and solutions. Art for Spirn come from the creative research that she’s been practicing through photography, history, communication with other and, as she mention to us when she has visited our class, music. While for Burle Marx

research that she’s been practicing through photography, history, communication with other and, as she mention to us when she has visited our class, music. While for Burle Marx his landscape projects emerged from his artistic, musical gifts. His landscape Project are like Painting that encompasses form and rhythm that pleasurably merge culture, movement and ecological functions. In his book the lyrical landscape Burle Marx wrote ‘Rhythm is not repetition, it is the relationship between one form and another, one space and another, one texture, one surface, one color and another’. “Boulders shape water in the streams- channel movement, help create the sounds of its music” Lawrence Halprin, his projects emphasize time and space in the design. He interpreted landscape though motions. In his sketch book he reflects that environmental design is a form of movement. For me, I feel that music as a sort of art can help landscape architects in understand the fabric of our cities’ landscape, music can be an interpretative way of listening to the abstract feeling of the urban landscape fabric of spaces and in the same time it can inspire our innovation to harmonically integrate our interpretation and the requirement of our environment in order to face the challenges of our existence. I’m going to explore the landscape through a musical framework. I feel that the way we structure our work in the landscape architecture profession simulate that of

structuring a sonata and in order

to compose our city in a healthier rhythms, music theory and musical composition would help in this process.

ARCHIVE

Landscape architecture is a dynamic profession that designs for movement. Spirn, in her visit to our research method class, stated that landscape is a design in time and she follow that by asking a question that stuck in my mind which is how can we deign for change of time? And as Halprin noted in his sketch book “Environmental design is form of movement”

he also wrote “ Motation (and he means movement by this world) it is a way

to design environment and movement, though it is an integrated way showing both together through a new language of symbols.

Music can accommodate this dynamic movement structure

of our profession because music is a medium that happened over time. Jane Jacobs in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, when she was talking about the order of old cities and it functionality, wrote” this order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it art from the city and liken it to the dance_ not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en-mass, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole” To research this subject of time and space and to investigate my feeling about the relationship between music and landscape architecture I’m going to search in archival data about data that been gathered from both musician and landscape architects and create a collaboration database of information that serve my purpose and help me in order to find innovative way to design places that make our cities healthier and sustainable. I’m hoping by understanding the process that contribute to the forming of music and landscape to be able to design a process or a metaphor

that create a different kind of form that would help cities be more healthier for

all species.

Jane Jacobs 1916-2006 http://www.myopenwallet.net/2006/04/jane-jacobs-1916-2006.html, http://alicectphoto.wordpress.com/2011/02/21/jane-jacobs-some-myths-about-diversity/

LAWRENCE HALPRIN 1916-2009 http://www.oregonlive.com/art/index.ssf/2009/10/landscape_legend_lawrence_halp.html, LAWRENCE HALPRIN sketch book

“Music can be said to embody ideas. These are not the ideas that may be found in scien-

tific tract but commentaries on a society showing what it means to live in it. They embrace development in sensitivity, in the human’s awareness of his own powers, and in the situation of internal freedom, as conditions change in the external world”(1). My plan is to search into the archival data for thoughts and inspirations that helped composer in composing music in order to understand how musician organizes the keys of a sonata to create a succession of tones that our ears interpreted them as a harmonic melody. In Alfred Brendel on Music book, Brendel while he was writing a recommendation for young pianist wrote “Among the most important gifts a Beethoven player can have is the power to

visualize, in an almost geographical sense, the entire panorama of varying dynamic levels embodied in a work_ like looking at a landscape and taking in at a single glance its valleys and mountain-tops”(2). I’m going to search what were the inspirations that lead to some of the famous symphonies. And I’m going to investigate how the well know composers manage to treat the harmony of their sonatas.

While I was investigating the theory of music composition and trying to understand the method of composing melodies and how the musical elements of a piece translate the ideas the composers want? I ran with the work of Paul d. Miller (Dj spooky), Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antractica, which is an acoustic portrait of Miller’s documentation for the rapidly changing Antarctica. His music composed from analysis the geographic data of the Antarctica. For Miller music is about patterns and about geometry. He described his observation to the Antarctica as that the ice was speaking to him. He thought about his composition

as a kind of landscape meditation. And he hoped that people will think about the idea of music as information not as a beautiful piece to let his music make people think about the environment. Miller said in an article he wrote for the Art Paper Magazine that many musical composers interpreted music in a form of song and explored the realm of nature through the prism of composition(1). To write his music he directly interact with the territory of the Antarctica. His method was to sample the environment with sound in order to paint an acoustic portrait of this rapidly transforming environment and making a map of continent in sound. According to him what Sinfonia Antarctica proposes to do is explore the realm of fiction and ideas that underlie almost all perceptions of Antarctica – from the interior desert plains, to the Transantarctic Mountains that divide the continent, the Suite will take samples of the different conditions, and transform them into multi-media portraits with music composed from the different geographies that make up the land mass.

Miller methods in composing his music remind me a lot of Anne whiston Spirn, her work as 1-http://www.djspooky.com/media/ART_PAPERS-Paul-Miller-Terra-Nova.pdf 2-The language of landscape , Anne Whiston Spirn, New Haven, Conn. : Yale University Press, ©1998 1-How music expresses ideas, Sidney Walter Finkelstein, New York : International Pub., [1970]. 2-Alfred Brendel on music : collected essays, Alfred Brendel, London : JR, ©2007.

a landscape architect reveals the importance of

the direct interaction in spaces and she

was always, through her photography and research, searching for the way to understand the language of the landscape. In her book the language of landscape she wrote “To read and

write landscape is to learn and teach: to know the world, to express ideas and to influence others. Landscape, as language, makes thought tangible and imagination possible.“ (2) And she also wrote in the same book “Landscape is loud with dialogues, with story lines that connect a place and its dwellers.” Those stories for her give people data and

information of the places that we inhabit, and they are sources for them to understand and reflect. Also Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein in their book A Pattern Language: Towns, Building, Construction provide an example of pattern language they called it “The Timeless Way” which extracted from their long experience in building and planning. Their aim was to provide the audience with a way to read the patterns of the problems that very often occur in our environment and learn by under standing it to find solutions. In their book they wrote “If you read through the sentence

that connect the groups of patterns to one another, you will get an overview of the whole language. And once you get overview, you will http://www.annewhistonspirn.com/pdf/Air-Quality_1986.pdf

then be able to find the patterns which are relevant to your own projectâ&#x20AC;?.(1)

Investigating the music composition theory to find a way that we can use it in landscape architecture profession made me realize that the only way of doing that is to really understand the composition of our field and the landscape of the city that we as landscape architects suppose to improve. So as consequence of this feelings I went back to the landscape architecture literature with aiming to analysis the methods and philosophies that well known landscape architects has. And to specify my task and related more to my thesis I started looking for landscape architects that use art as a tool of integration between the components of landscape architecture works and practically I aimed to search for landscape architects whom works aim to achieve more ecological functions

at. Based

on my previous knowledge, I know that Roberto Burle Marx is one of those landscape architects who used art and music as inspiration to compose his landscape architecture. To understand his mind and philosophy I stared analyses his work and read through the literature that he has written. In a book titled, Roberto Burle Marx: the Modernity of land1-A pattern language : towns, buildings, construction, Christopher Alexander; et al, New York : Oxford Univ. Press, 1977(repr. 1979)

scape,

Marx wrote â&#x20AC;&#x153;My philosophical conceptualization of the constructed landscape, be

it garden, park or development of urban area, is situated along the historical trajectory of all epochs while recognizing, in each period, the expression of aesthetic thought manifested in the other arts. In this sense, my work reflects modernity, the time in which it is executed, yet never loses sight of the reasons of tradition itself, which are valid and desired. Roberto Burle Marx was multitalented Brazilian artist who holds a special place in the development of modernism in the field of landscape architecture. Marx used

Roberto Burle Marx 1909-1994 http://thearchie.com/en/sobre-la-plasticidad-urbana-roberto-burle-marx/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=sobre-la-plasticidad-urbana-roberto-burle-marx

art,science, culture, politic and history in creating a new language that combine his identity and his design tools and principle while composing his landscape designs. As he once said “ I can think of music and poetry to produce a painting” .Lars Lerup in an article tittled Bifurcation wrote” when Burle Marx created Paintings and landscape in-

spired by music, he inadvertently (or maybe not) joined artifice and nature, as it turns out seamlessly. This will be our future, but only if we chose wisely. It appears in light of a number of ecological tempests (global warming, desert expansions because of deforestation, water pollution, the destruction of the Brazilian rain forest..the list goes on), that our war with nature must end. We can no longer escape ourselves. The artificial distinction between other species _ our habitat_ and us has come full circle. Even the distniction between body and mind is in question. Intehration and a new synthesis appear to be our only salvation. Here Burle Marx comes to rescue. “ (1). Marx loved music, his parents taugh him and his brother music

when they were kids, his brother became compos-

er and Marx took the love of music whith him and used in his process of designing landscapes, he wrote” In garden, we shall always know whether to compose a symphony or simple 1-Roberto Burle Marx : the modernity of landscape, Lauro Cavalcanti; Farès El-Dahdah; Francis Rambert; Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine (Paris, France), [Paris] : Cite de l’architecture & du patrimoine/Institut francais d’architecture ; [Barcelona] : Actar, 2011.

motet. A plant may be seen as a musical note. When played of a chord, it will produce a certain sound, but in a different chord, this value will change”.

“I’m interested in the ground under cities and how it relates to the things that we build

on top, and how those relationships might prompt you to do something in a very different way from town to town.”walter hood from Dashka Slate’s interview with him. Walter’s landscape designs emerge from his deep understanding of the fabric of the space and how

people interact with places. And he translate these understanding to the life in city through a unique way he call it “Improvisation”.

For him means to improvise within the

given rhythmic context like how jazz musician compose their music from the framework of tradition of sound & form. He believe that unless we really understand the setting of our build environment we cannot improvise and he gave an example for landscape architecture from the world of composing music “‘Most people think of improvisation as a set of uncon-

scious actions. But it’s much more than that, more intellectual and experiential. For musicians, it’s finding that place they know they can improvise – between the first and the third beat, for instance – but they can’t play just anything, they have to know what to play. Musicians improvising have a really clear understanding of the tradition they want to improvise in.” Through my thesis research I’m going to look more into the philosophy that hold his designed project, look through his sketches and hopefully interview him to get better understanding about what he think about music in landscape architecture .

1-http://www.djspooky.com/articles/xenakis.php, last tome check 12-06-1013 at 1:00am

A good example of working with music and design as one domain would be the work of Iannis Xenakis.

For him, music was architecture, and architecture was music (1). He build

a linkage between the world of math, music, science and architecture. Xenakis once wrote in his notes on a different music composition “sonic events are made out of thousands of isolated sounds; this multitude of sounds, seen as a totality, is a new sonic event. This mass event is articulated and forms a plastic mold of time, which itself follows aleatory and stochastic laws (music constructed from the principle of indeterminism that Xenakis

originated in 1954). If one then wishes to form a large mass of point-notes, such as string pizzicati, one must know these mathematical laws, which in any case, are no more than a tight and concise expression of a chain of logical reasoning. Paul Miller said once describing him “for Xenakis, music is usually the forerunner of other conceptual developments that occur in society.” Xenakis is an architect trained and worked with Le Corbusier. He is one of the most important modernist composers of the 20th century. Together with the architect Le Corbusier and the composer Edgard Varese they form the environment of Philips Pavilion in the first World Fair that been held after the world War II. Xenakis was responsible for designing the architecture of the pavilion, and since he was also trained as a musician, he was able to collaborat well with the electronic poem that Le Corbusier created and the music of Edgard Varese. The architecture of the building create a transitional music that guided people into the formal space of organized sound. As Arch Daily put it in an article titled ,AD Classics: Expo ’58 + Philips Pavilion / Le Corbusier and Iannis Xenakis, “ The resulting Poem Electronique along with the pavilion, was the first electronic-spatial environment to combine architecture, film, light and music to a total experience made to functions in time and space”. Iannis Xenakis devised a computerized musical composition tool called UPIC. This tool developed at the Centre d’Etudes de Mathématique et Automatique Musicales(CEMAMu) in Paris, and was completed in 1977 . This tool is linked to a large-size digitizer table (75 by 60 cm) on which the users design their music using an electromagnetic pencil. This tool could translate graphical images into musical results.

Iannis Xenakis 1922-2001

Moreover, I believe that Lawrence Halprin can be a great inspirational for me in my thesis. I’m going to study his design look through the archival data that people have done on his life and examine his thoughts and ideas that he put in his sketch book. In addition I’m going to explore the landscape architecture work of well-known landscape architecture and try to define the idea of time and space in landscape based on my research for success landscape works.

‘I wanted to create space as a layer of musical experience.’ That what Ben Mawson ,a composer, said about his intention behind creating musical landscapes. He called his music “music you can walk inside, like invisible sculpture”. Mawason is doing research on how spatialisation of sound, particularly in virtual environments, can create more organic, changeable experience of digitally produced sound and music. Moreover the novelist Geoff Nicholson tried to understand the relationship between the walking experience and music in his book The Lost Art Of Walking. In this book Nicholson was trying to trace according to him, why and how people walk, what walking is, what it does and what it means?

One

chapter in his book titled As I Tripped Out One Morning: Music, Movement, Movies. In this chapter he was investigating the way in which certain songs can act as self-guided walking tour.

And I’m going to look at history and culture of music and cities’ landscape in order to draw the connection of evolution that happen on each.

Because both landscape and music

are the effects of surrounding context. Researching the history of the evolution would

help me to define the pattern of design that music and landscape went through. Both music and the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s landscape design have gone through changes of style and form, like renaissance, baroque, rococo, classic, and romantic. below.

Explain more what these figures are

PHOTO-DOCUMENTATION / VISUAL ANALYSIS

I went to Juanita beach Park on Friday the 10th in 2013 with the intention of doing photo documentation to the site. My question was to figure out the special composition of the site and how the design decisions of the designers inform the social and ecological performance of the site. And in my inner self I was trying to analysis the composition of site through music and listen according to my interpretation to the music of it.

In first picture I tried to capture the terrain of the earth and how it

Again in this the picture on the right I tried to cap-

can inform the way people interact with the place. Moreover I wanted to

ture the composition of the site. And I wanted the

capture the distance that people choose to sit away from each other. And

photography to be a medium that help me in my study to

the reason why I frame this picture that way is to show the formation

detect the pattern of a space.

and how the ecological function of the site, here I mean “the wetland

more about your “findings” – explain to the reader what

area, bioswales”, and the human places interact and support each other.

composition this photo conveys

And I thought that in this integration of the layers there was a con-

The second picture

scious composition that the designer tried to do and that what I made

site. I wanted my photo here to present the delicate

my photo capture. When I do photography I try to let my photos reveal

sensation of the site that I believed when I capture it

the special sculpture of the site. This sculpture representation going

that it unconsciously interact to the overall feeling

to help my thesis inquiry in understanding the fabric of spaces and the

that people get in the park.

composition of music that abstractly hiding in the space’s layers.

Okay, but then explain

represents the small details in the

I believe that people interaction with a place complete the music composition of that place. Because the movement of people and other species through that place make us understand the landscape and make us measure the success of it. These are the thoughts behind the reason of taking and framing these pictures. I want these pictures to provide a sense of the layer of movement in the site. Picture I think freeze the time and space for second to help the researcher analyses the setting of the places.

My intention was in taking these picture is to capture the meaning of movement in landscape. I was shoutinghoping to capture the meaning of movement in photography. The stillness of photography I believe that some time can deeply narrates a story.

The first picture from above shows where the water moves from its freedom state to hid under the path that facilitates the movement of human to emerge again from the second threshold to the lake of Washington. I tried to photograph the terrain of the earth to illustrate the movement of water. And I tried to show the lake in the background of my photo to describe the cycle of water movement.

In the these two pictures, first I tried to illustrate the sense of the place then I zoomed in to focus on one cell of the system which is, in the bottom picture, the family. And I intentionally frame my picture with the treeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s trunk in the front and I wanted to show a bluer movement in the background. What this picture illustrate too is the sense of play even if the playground isnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t shown in it.

In the three pictures of this page the photography reveals actions. The first picture shows the lady playing with the dog and enjoying the refugee away from people. There are couples who anticipate the place as it has a romantic setting and the other two people behind are looking ahead to the water body. And in the background there are people walking and running on the floating extended bridge. The second picture show the couple in the edge that separate the wetland from the volleyball court. I wanted to represent the feeling of peace and calmness that those tow have. I also wanted to show how the action that some people do in a place create a different sense in that place. The third picture reveals the action of refuge. The tree people looking ahead while they are talking to each other, the grasses and the section of trees and the fence all together represent the refugee states of the place. And I think that the fence in this photo indicate a unique place behind.

OBSERVATIONS

My Goals for this assignment was to experiment observing environmental behavior. But before starting and to let my observation serves my curiosity in understanding the composition of urban fabric I made a diagram that allowed me to capture the combination of physical space and the human reaction to that place.

The horizontal line represents the

regular rhythm of 20 foots and the vertical line would have symbols for things that Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m going to encounter and was divided in 5 lines that would rate how much those things arose emotions on me (whether were negative or positive) while Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m experimenting the place. In this diagram I was inspired from the organization of the musical score were the horizontal lines would defined the timing of unite of keys, and the vertical lines would define the tense of the key. And both of them defined the melody of the song.

My idea was to

Golden Gardens Park: observing where people decide to site on the beach.

self-reflect on how the build environment with all details that it contains off effects our emotions and reactions to the place. And how much this build environment is effecting the walkability of the street? And to reflect my reactions and emotions by walking through the place which was the Kirkland Way Street I illustrate the emotional arousal that I had each 20’ by drawing curve according to the vertical lines.

Golden Gardens Park: looking at the shade and the sun and how that effect the activities that is happening in the space.

However, experimenting with the observation method through this diagram was harder than I anticipated. The Built environment of the city is very complex and contains many details (vegetation, building, cars, noise, people, material, parking, birds ...) and there are other components to the complexity that effect our emotions which are the width of the road and the width of the sidewalk, the sceneries that the eye can capture while the person is walking, the distance of the building from the sidewalk whether this distance was vegetated or just paved, the elevation of the road and many more. This complexity I found myself struggling to present and note on a diagram with 2 dimensional representation of special distances and emotions. Edward R. Tufte in his book “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information wrote” graphics showed the shape of data in a comparative perspective.”

I didn’t consider that my collected data presented to me any perspective

on the urban fabric of the city. But I still believe that a more developed diagram with more deep collection of data will help me better understand the urban fabric and how it is composed in order to inspire from the music composition to create a harmony in the E.J. Marey, la method Graphique (Paris, 1995) p.

city.

In Edward R. Tufte book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information he has many

helpful techniques that can be helpful for me in this process. He presented in this book

three graphics that he thought they excellently explain the multivariate complexity of data and this according to Tufte might be the best statistical graphic ever drawn. My second observation was to a place in Kirkland. I went there and I stand for an hour observing the action of people in the place. And analyzing how can the setting of a place determine that activities that would happen on that place and who going to use it.

My observation happened at 10:00 in the morning till 11:00. It was a sunny day with beautiful weather. The site has French bakery and a kids toys shop with gardens facing those two shops and forming the corner of the street. The border of the gardens are by them self a concert benches and there is a bear sculpture in one section of the garden. Most of the people who visited the site duting this hour are mothers with their babies. Some mothers where just passing through and some mothers meet in group in this area.

Few

runners pass by the cafĂŠ and other run in the pedestrian path between the road and the garden. Mothers who choose to stay stands outside the cafĂŠ closer to the garden under the sun. When more people start coming I start notice more birds coming.

The observation, along with understanding of the built environment and how the physical environment affects the way people use the space, in addition to observing their emotions, all are very important ingredients to design better and healthier city for people and the ecosystem in general. Sitting in that area of Kirkland make me realize many small detail, I enjoyed looking at how people move and how they gather. How much distance they leave away from each other and what is the comfy space that a group of people can use? And how much the gardens on the corner attract people to it?

MAPPING

The horizontal line represents the

My idea was to

self-reflect on how the build environment with all details that it contains off effects our emotions and reactions to the place. And how much this build environment is effecting the walkability of the street? And to reflect my reactions and emotions by walking through the place which was the Kirkland Way Street I illustrate the emotional arousal that I had each 20â&#x20AC;&#x2122; by drawing curve according to the vertical lines.

I think in order to peruse my thesis idea a variety of mapping technique would help me in my research process. One is to find out a way to map myself explorations to the site that I’m going to use and for other sites that I’m going to test in order to understand the urban fabric. I’m going to observe the sites that considered to be sustainable and map the way things are moving on them. And I’m going to use maps and diagrams to collect data from my observation to the life in city from different area of Seattle. My plan is to let maps that have my collected data on it ( GIS archival data, observation data, and some data that I would take from interviewing people in Seattle) illustrate what are the good criteria of a city? Where in Seattle more work should be done?

And what are special

environment elements that considered to contribute to the livability of the city? I’m going to understand the temporality of spaces in the city that lawrence halprin and Kevin Lynch talked about through the use of behavior and physical mapping. And I’m going to try the technique of palimpsest in layering my maps together in order to understand the fabric composition of the city of Seattle. In order to understand people’s reactions to the surrounding I’m going to use the perceptual mapping techniques. My goal is to print a map on a hard paper and put next to it various sizes of circular stickers , where each size represent a degree of emotion that the person who is doing the mapping felt when s/he walk through the area.

And after the perceptual maps that I got I would integrate the results with other data that I have collect into the GIS and look at the composition of data together then analyses what the meaning of compositions.

INTERVIEWING

In a book titled In Real World Research, Robson in the Interview chapter wrote â&#x20AC;&#x153;asking people directly about what is going on is an obvious short cut in seeking answers to our research questionsâ&#x20AC;?. This is true because the researcher could have the opportunity to see the researchable matter according to the people in the same matter or situation. Archival research and observation in the landscape architecture profession can build an enormous understanding to the context and the layers of a particular site and preciouses understanding to a phenomena. However, combining that with the interview method can develop a better understanding and a different layer of inquiry that sometime would help clarify our assumption and minimize the trick of falling into our biases. For my research I kind of feel that interview it is a very important tool that would enhance the development of the toolkit that I described on the beginning of this paper. I need to understand the effects of some of the sustainable design elements in street, parks or any public space on the way people experiencing spaces. The interview method together with the mapping method can help me develop an emotional map for places in the cities in order to better understand the element that make the walkability and movement of people easier and Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m hoping that this map would help me develop better understanding for the symphony of the complex urban fabric of the city.

On the other hand, I need the interview method to interview professionals from both landscape architecture and music field. This kind of interview would be semi-structured interviews to allow for some kind of freedom both for me to change the order of question depending on the fluidity of the conversation, and for my interviewee to talk freely on the subject that inspire them. And I would like my conversation with professional to be

be more like a conversation then a structured interview because I’m kind of discovering this area of research. However, I would like the interview to have a semi-structural layout to create a comparison at the end between the different views that I would get from both professional of both field.

But the interview could be in some cases time consuming. There is a need for preparation that happened before the interview, the interview itself and when you can get it, and the process of transforming the record to a written case.

And the interviewer should be

skilled enough to be able to direct the interview in the way that serve his or her research. For my first interview my intention was to make the interview as open as I can. Since I’m now in the period of developing my thesis idea, I wanted to learn from my interviewee even things that I didn’t though about. I decided and based on the recommendation that I got from my professor Lynne Manzo, to interview a professor from the Music Department of University of Washington. I prepared my questions in a way that would work for interviewing a landscape architect and a music composer, because I’m planning to create a collaboration data in my research. The Question were as following: because I’m planning to create a collaboration data in my research. The Question were as following: 1-Do you see a relationship between music and the build environment? 2-what drive your music composition decisions? 3-How do you defined or describe a good harmonic structure? 4-How the musical elements of a piece translate the ideas the composer wants?

5-Generally, How do you think music can inform one’s approach to design? 6-What consideration you put while you are composing your music to effectively engage with your audience or the environment that we are living in? The first step I did is to find a composer in the Music Department. I went to the Department Website and read about the background of each composer to see who has interest in landscape or soundscape. And I looked at the professors who teach the music theory because teaching the music theory include the understanding of many aspect of music including music compositions and a wild familiarity with music’s history. I sent an e-mail to one composer and one professor who teach music theory but unfortunately I didn’t get any response. I waited three days and sent e-mails to the rest of the composer which are four and one other music theory professor. And fortunately I got one response form Prof. Huck Hodge whom have interest in exploring the embodied poetics of organized sound, perceptual illusion and the threshold between design and intuition.

The e-mail that I sent include the purpose of my interview, the one big question that I felt would be the most important to me and base on a recommendation that I got form Prof. Lynne Manzo “How music can inform one’s approach to design?” and I included my thesis idea. And I believe based on the experience that I got from this interview that this was very helpful thing to do specially with professionals, because actually Prof. Hodge generate an understanding about the nature of my interview and it seems, when I met with him (and that was very kind from him), that he prepared himself to help me and he brought me some books that he thinks would be good start for my research.

Sending a clear e-mail at the beginning made the introduction easier on me. I just started to say couple of worlds and those were good introduction for Hodge to start the conversation. And actually he is the one who asked the first question that he thought would be a good question for me to ask to myself which is” How do you defined music?” . The things that he started talking about where the answer of my question that I have sent to him in e-mail pulse he headed on other questions that I was going to ask as well? During the interview I used some probes like nodding in my head or provide some sound that shows that I’m following what he is saying, and repeating some sentences form his talk but in the way that I interpreted. Moreover, there were some questions that I didn’t ask but he answered them in some way during our conversation, so to have more specific and deeper answers on them I mentioned to him that he answered my question but I repeat the question in order to have more specifications. Prof. Hodge was very thoughtful person, and I really appreciate the efforts that he put to answers my questions and his patient to provide as much as he can clarity to

where he thought the relationship between Music and

landscape can excite . From me first interview, I feel that I have important data to integrate in my future research and I discovered a lot of new research that I should learn about.

Recording the interview was super helpful. However, interviewers should be familiar to use the recorder. I borrow a recorder from the library an hour before the interview, because the policy of the library is to have the audio recorder only for four hours. During the interview I pressed the recorder bottom and to be sure to record the interview I used

my IPhone too as an audio recorder. For some reason which I don’t know the real recorder didn’t work and since the IPhone audio recorder tool doesn’t gives a good sound resolution I couldn’t use any program that transform the speech to text. And since my interview with Hodge took an hour and ten minutes the process of transforming the speech to test took a long time.

What helped a lot in my interview is that I developed a good understanding of the nature of the subject that my interview going to discuss, and a good understanding of my interviewee’s background and interests. Because I made my interviewee and through some comment that I made and through answering some of his question feel comfortable

that I would

understand the things that he is going to talk about even if I’m coming from different background.

-How do you define music?

It maybe useful to come to an understanding of sound itself as a medium that create experience

Music is part of that but very often when people talk about music they talk specifically about a piece of concert music in fact when you doing in ecology

if u walk around the space ,outside, the sound influence your experience it is not necessary that the place been organized based on musical principles it just the way

First of all the sort of sound embedded in the place

If you are by pike place market the wide verity of sound that create the experience

And it is not only the visual experience that create that experience you have the sound of the people the sound of the seagulls , the sound of water and boat and every things and that create very specific experience

malda takieddine 6/13/13 1:31 AM Comment [1]: The experience of space and music.

And then if you are really interested in creating, sort of, organizing the sounds that are inherent in a place then u should start to the spaces

them self filter sound or create certain challenge of sound ..the acoustics is right there is particle design choice that create a sonic experience create sound experience

so you can compose the place based on sound when the organization embodied in the place it is iself

-how the element of place and how the elecment that cereat more

malda takieddine 6/13/13 1:35 AM Comment [2]: The composition of a place

CLOSING REFLECTION ON LESSONS LEARNED

The best lesson learned from practicing some of the research method in this course was that through research we can test our hypothesis and correct our imaginable theories. For me the observation method that I tried helped me a lot in defending what could be legible and achievable in my thesis idea. Moreover, it makes me realize that things in the real world are more complicated from the way our minds imagine them to be.

Observation method

widen the consciousness of our mind to the world that surrounding us or in another word it can make the unconsciousness for the things that affect us as human move to the level of consciousness.

Archival was also a great method that helped frame my thesis idea. And it helped me measure to what extend I can push my ideas. Moreover, archival data can helped me in defining my research questions. The archival research method illustrated to me how my ideas can be achievable. And I realized that I can use this method to make my own data through creating a collaborating file that mixed my research that I’ve done on music with that which I’ve done on the role of landscape in creating healthier cities.

But when it comes to photography the fun research come to play. I really enjoyed this method of research and actually I enjoyed photography more when I wanted to let my photos to express meaning. I felt when I was photographing the Juanita Bay Park that I’m an investigator and that the evidence are walking me through the space. I tried to find the shot that reveal my feeling that I had during my exploration visit.

Moreover, I wanted

my picture to illustrate to my research the composition of layers in a landscape.