I acknowledge the Traditional Owner of the lands upon which this body of work has been developed and produced.
Introduction
Chapter 01: Lively Landscape Connections
Introduction
Diagrammatic Sections
Expanded Sections
Chapter 02: Lively Entanglement
Introduction
Ecological Entanglements
Raw Material Formation
Production Process
Historical Links
Chapter 03: Critical Reading Practice
Introduction
Content Diagram
Reading Diagram
Chapter 04: A hope for the Future
Introduction
Design Proposition Lively Section Future Section
Epilogue
Notes
Figure List
Bibliography
Figure 01. Anil Prabhakar, Let me help you? : Once Humanity dying in Mankind, sometime animals are guiding us back to our basics,2020, Photography, CNN Travel, https://edition.cnn. com/2020/02/07/asia/orangutan-borneo-intl-scli/index.html.
INTRODUCTION
Humans have become the single most influential species on the earth, continuously shaping and altering the environmental systems that other organisms depend on. This unprecedented impact on the land, water, organisms, and atmosphere has become a distinctive character of the era we are living in, called the ‘Anthropocene’. Human civilization over the last century pushed other species and interdependences to the point of extinction, making an long lasting and irreversible impact on the earth. Hence, Anthropos has become an irresistible force capable of building, destroying, birthing, and killing all other species on the planet.1
In this context, it is imperative that we orient ourselves to the Anthropocene conditions, material entanglements, and current scholarly thinking. This understanding is crucial for developing ethical and responsible practices and for redefining our position in this world. Understanding these lively relationships between scholarly knowledge and physical materials is a form of recognizing and remembering our past entanglements with landscape
and other non-human species. Here I want to recall a particular image that was widespread on the Internet a few years ago. The photographs show an orangutan extending his hand to help a man out of a snake-infested river. The man was working to clear the snakes as part of protecting the critically endangered apes. This image raises important questions. Do we know the science behind this relationship? What if that extended hand of the Ape has many more hidden clues for us Humans?
This field guide for encounters curates drawings, observations, responses to critical reading, reflections, and relationships to lively materials (both physical and scholarly) that helped me understand those more than human conditions.
Chapter 01: Lively Landscape Connections
Figure 02. (Above &Bottom) Authors photographs showing site observation process.
INTRODUCTION
Lively Landscape Connections is a critical drawing approach to practice a slow careful observation and drawing of lively processes in landscape and their broader impacts. These lively processes and life-sustaining rhythms have been in place for thousands of years that provides all species with their needs. Can we resonate with these pulses as design professionals? Can we learn from our close observations of these landscape entanglement? As Rose says, “...we are called into recognition: of the shimmer of life’s pulses and the great patterns within which the power of life expresses it self” 2
The interaction among materials and environmental forces, such as light, wind, rain, plants, fungi, bacterial actions and other organisms may guide us in these learnings.
This practice of observational drawing engaged me in understanding and interacting with complex living organisms and their life sustaining processes. It also helped me to think about the implications of those processes in design and how landscape architect can participate in these relationships. The process involved twenty minutes time spending in an isolated forest area and observing some regenerative lively processes at Yarra Bend Park in Melbourne. Through line drawings, arrows and annotations, I tried to capture some of my observations about movements, phases, relationships and changes.
Dead tree log can be a host for many fungi, insects, (termite, beetles) and bacteria...becoming full of life! Even new plants and mosses can grow on them. Dead trees take a long time to decompose and all these fungi, insects and bacteria take part in this process.
Insects, like Termite helps further decomposition because they carry fungi spores on their feet deep into the log. These fungi break down the cellulose of the dead wood using enzymes. These helps termites to get more nutrients.
Figure 04. Lively processes on a dead log.
Fungi on dead log are the decomposers of the forest floor. They like to grow close to the ground moisture and in the shaded areas. They spread their spores on the ground and establish mycelium network with other plants
These fungi break down even the toughest part of the dead log and release nutrients into the soil.
05. Fungi action and regenerative processes.
Figure
“.....Who gets to decide who can live and who needs to die? It’s a clear example of how capitalistic human interests —money — strongly influence what we study and therefore, what we know. A financialization of what we know, what we study, informing and forming our collective memory.”3
Ostendorf-Rodriguez, Yasmine. “Teaching Two: How to Review Our Collective Memory: Recognising Entanglements as an Act of Responsibility” in Let’s Become Fungal! Mycelium Teachings and the Arts (Amsterdam: Valis, 2023), p40-63
In this book chapter, author Ostendorf demonstrates how remembering human-nature entanglements throughout history can help us to unite, collaborate, and express our solidarity with various struggles and movements. It can help us work towards our shared future interests and reform our collective memories. Ostendorf used the complex underground network of mycelium as an analogy to show how our past landscape stories and practices connect us with Nature and more-than-human processes when we keep aside our superior attitude towards other species. Through different examples of activism, movements, and protests, Ostendorf suggests that the healing of people and Nature often goes hand in hand as they both have inseparable pasts as well as futures. Also, she calls on the role of our contemporary art and ethnography museums to nurture and revisit our collective memories that can bring people together, bridging our past, present, and future. This reading helped me understand how recognizing entanglements and revisiting our collective memories can help us bring justice to our landscape practice and human history.
Fall off bark from trees eventually decomposes and goes to the ground nutrients.
Shedding barks from live trees is a repair mechanism that allows new growth, removes damaged skin, and contributes to soil formation
06. Tree shedding barks as a lively process.
Figure
EXPANDED SECTIONS
The forest floor accumulates all the tree parts, barks, leaves, and decomposed parts. They enrich ground nutrients and moisture, helping regenerate plants and new lives.
08. Lively processes contribute to the ground composition.
Figure
In an expanded scenario, the whole forest participates in this regeneration process, which provides food and shelter to millions of organisms and lives.
Figure 09. Lively processes contribute to the ground composition and regeneration of new lives.
Regeneration of new plants from the ground.
Fungi and Tree roots exchange nutrients and carbon under ground.
Bird Rose, Deborah “Shimmer: When All You Love is Being Trashed” in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, edited by Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan and Nils Bubandt), G51-G63. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
This book chapter by Deborah Bird Rose draws our attention to the multi species symbiotic processes around the biosphere in contrast to the disastrous impact of the Anthropocene. By using the concept of Shimmer, an ability to see the power of creation ancestors in Aboriginal Culture, Rose guides us in a vibrating world where everything responds to the pulse of seasonal cycles and new growth. She shows us how human interferences and fictitious exceptionalism push other species and the associated natural processes to the edge of peril as evidence of human cruelty. The fascinating story of angiosperms, flying foxes, and the whole entanglement of nature seeks human attention for care so that we can experience the Shimmer of life as our existence is equally dependent on them. This text informed me about a different understanding of the Anthropocene, a cycle of harm and care in the web of multi-species entanglements, mass extinction, initiatives for protection, and above all of these, how nature finds its way to thrive.
“Those kin groups include the human and non human descendants of the ancestors
...... Life flows from ancestors into the present and on into the future, and from the outset it is a multispecies interactive project involving (minimally) flying foxes, angiosperms, and human beings.”4
Materials we use to build our city mostly come in a commodity form, and we often fail to realize what process of raw matter extraction is involved and how it is affecting the plants, animals, minerals, fossil fuels, and ecological linkages of other places that took millions of years to be established. An inspection of this lively entanglements between Material consumption and raw matter formulation unfolds a new perspective about materials with “…a desire to think of construction materials not as fixed commodities or inert products, but as continuous with the landscape they come from, with the people they shape them”5
Lively entanglement explores a construction material (in this case, steel) in terms of its entire life cycle by tracing its past life, geological formation, extraction, global relationship with material migration, and other depen-
dent processes. In this exploration, I worked with a group to understand the temporal and spatial processes of ‘steel’ production in a collaborative process of readings and drawings. Lastly, we presented our findings in multi-faceted timelines and small spatial drawings and diagrams.
The Banded Iron Formation took shape nearly 3.8-1.8 billion years ago in the ancient ocean when the atmosphere and ocean had no oxygen. Oxygen was produced by photosynthetic organisms (Cyanobacteria ). However, it reacted with iron dissolved in seawater and formed iron oxide minerals on the ocean’s surface called banded iron formations. Image source: Online
a) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyanobacteria
b) https://museum.wa.gov.au
c) https://news.rice.edu/news/2023/iron-rich-rocks-unlock-new-insights-earthsplanetary-history
A point in time when humans are consuming materials & resources that took billions of years to form
Figure 11. Diagram to understand Ecological Entanglements of material Steel.
HOLOCENE EPOCH
RAW MATERIAL FORMATION
Figure 12. Melissa Luppi, Raw Material Formation. 2024. Pen on Tracing, RMIT.
“ What if we looked at materials not simply as single-purpose products or commodities, but instead as continually changing matter that takes different forms, and is shaped by - but also shapes- others? ”6
Hutton, Jane. “Introduction”, in Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements, by Jane Hutton, 1-22, Taylor and Francis Group, 2019.
This introductory chapter to Hutton’s book discusses how ‘Materials’ can be seen beyond their value as commodities by linking the place of material production to the site of material uses. By tracing five material movements from various parts of the globe to the city of Manhattan throughout a period of one and a half centuries, Hutton demonstrates how materials are continuously evolving through different places and processes that people shape, and later they shape people. While clearly stating the unequal exchange between the site of production and consumption, the writer uses the word “reciprocity” to foreground the interdependencies between humans and the more-than-human world. In this context, ‘reciprocity’ refers to the mutual exchange and influence between humans and the environment in the process of material production and consumption. Hence, I can see materials as connections between two sites, their people, and other species that are affected in the transaction process and consider the designer’s role in conveying this process to the end user. Also, it may influence my future practice through my awareness of past histories and the entanglements of the landscape, as well as my concern about the selection of materials for my design project.
PRODUCTION PROCESS
13.
Figure
Oliver Sladdin, Production Process of Steel. 2024. Pen on Tracing, RMIT.
Chapter 04: A hope for the Future
Design Iteration of RMIT Design Hub Courtyard engaging porous material as paving finish that gives shelter to termites and other micro-organisms, absorbing rain waters and helping plants and regenerative growth.
Design Iteration of the Courtyard engaging dead trees (as a house of fungi and other living organisms), retention pond, and reuse of the construction debris to allow regeneration process
This chapter delves into the task of responding and collaborating with the dynamic pulses of the Earth systems. It advocates for a fresh approach to design that not only acknowledges but also embraces the intricate entanglements between humans and the more-than-human world, offering a beacon of hope for a more sustainable and harmonious future.
As built environment designers, our role in material selection and responsible use is crucial. We need to collectively rethink our design practice, addressing that these material resources are finite in the environment and are not solely meant for human uses.8 Hence, we need, on the one hand, to understand these lively and regenerative processes around us; on the other hand, we need to ensure that those elements participate in our design thinking from a care giving perspective.
Can our design embrace these regenerative processes?
Can we learn about the long-sustaining processes of Earth?
The figure shows some drawings from a design iteration workshop on smallscale design interventions in the RMIT Design Hub courtyard to integrate lively, regenerative processes of Earth systems.
We can imagine the transformative potential of these lively organisms and processes becoming a part of our design, drifting us from traditional human-centred design practice. This shift could inspire a new era of design, one that is more in tune with the more-than-human world.
A porous material is thought to be a paving finish that gives shelter to termites and other microorganisms, allowing the surface to change over time.
Figure 17. Drawings showing Plan and Long Section.
Long Section of RMIT Courtyard
Design Proposition RMIT Courtyard
butterflies and other insects.
Overflow pipe for strom water management.
Figure 18. Plan and Section showing the regenerative process.
Dead log, and Termite it in,is placed wooden floor decomposed by Termite
with fungus Termite action on placed on the floor
LIVELY SECTION
invites Birds for food and shelter.
Retention pond, and reuse of the construction debris
Fruit Tree
FUTURE SECTION
The wooden floor becomes permeable as a result of termite action
Figure 19. Section showing the regenerative process over time.
Fungi on dead log breaks the cellulose for termites
Overtime Termites make their colony in the form of termite mound
Surface run off water accumulates and provides moisture for the fungi on dead log.
Epilogue:
The whole process of reading, writing, and drawing was very engaging for me. We had our research on ‘Steel’, and I was correlating various things from the reading texts with my group mates. While reading those texts, highlighting the key ideas, I was trying to read purposefully and working out different methods to see how they help. By doing so, I found that taking notes while reading helped me to navigate through the texts and ideas. Moreover, I had an opportunity to reflect on what I had learned and connect ideas with others through the drawings and annotations. Through the reading, writing, and drawing process, I understand the profound impact of the Anthropocene era on the history of nature and ecology. It revealed how we destroyed our past ecologies and multispecies interdependencies while realizing our abstract homocentric ideal. Also, the task developed a new
interpretation of the everyday commodities we use, such as our clothes, accessories, spaces and even our foods. While consuming these commodities, we are shaping the future of other landscapes and ecologies, where we never even existed.
The process of making diagrams of the site observations and learning with Landscape was an enriching experience for me. I can recall the discussion we had at Yarra Bend Park, while a glimpse of geological formation, historical events and an introduction to the available plants gave us a new insight into the landscape we were working on. My drawings were informed by those site knowledge, observations and the learning from the texts, which I think will be an important takeaway for my next steps, helping me to be a responsible designer.
NOTES :
1. Elaine Gan et al., “Haunted Landscapes of the Anthropocene”, in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, ed. Anna Tsing, et al (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), G12.
2. Deborah Bird Rose, “Shimmer: When All You Love is Being Trashed” in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, ed. Anna Tsing, et al (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), G61.
3. Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodriguez, “Teaching Two: How to Review Our Collective Memory: Recognising Entanglements as an Act of Responsibility”, in Let’s Become Fungal! Mycelium Teachings and the Arts, by Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodriguez (Amsterdam: Valis, 2023), 50.
4. Rose, “Shimmer: When All You Love is Being Trashed”, G52.
5. Jane Hutton, “Introduction” in Reciprocal Landscape: Stories of Material Movements, by Jane Hutton (London: Taylor and Francis Group, 2019), 5.
6.Hutton, “Introduction,” 17.
7. Elaine Gan et al., “Haunted Landscapes of the Anthropocene”, G2.
8. Alice Lewis, “Drawing 3: Designing with Lively Landscape Processes through Plan and Section,” ARCH 1359: MLA Design Research Seminars- Lively Matters (Lecture, Melbourne: RMIT University, May1, 2024)
