■ Grooming In the following projects, Grooming transcends the ubiquitous notion of maintenance as the preservation of a fixed state, and instead articulates it as a responsive pattern of cultivation that advances a more phenomenological reading of the landscape.
Maintenance is often considered a line of defense within landscape architecture: a set of generic operations that defends a singular design intent from the dynamism of the medium. However, it is this inherent dynamism of the medium, its insistent temporality, that makes the potential relationship of a project and its grooming one of the most interesting and largely overlooked relationships. In this chapter, Grooming suggests two main objectives. The first is to impart a visible language and experiential form to maintenance operations. The second is to redefine maintenance beyond post-construction management: to broaden its scope to include site preparation, construction process, and post-construction practices as a continuum of actions within an overall design intent. In the following projects, Grooming transcends the ubiquitous notion of maintenance as the preservation of a fixed state, and instead articulates it as a responsive pattern of cultivation that advances a more phenomenological reading of the landscape. The operations of Grooming dissolve the bias towards a final, designed object, and opt instead for emergence as the design objective. Grooming recognizes the temporal dynamism of landscape systems and requires that maintenance unfolds as a series of choreographed performances throughout the lifecycle of a landscape site. These operations may be chronologically synchronized, or they may be implemented as parallel and separate systems to be launched simultaneously and combined strategically, but both approaches consider site preparation decisions for ongoing management issues.
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Grooming itself is seen here as an abstraction, a life-support technology that corresponds to a set of given or imposed constraints. Within this definition, the materialization of Grooming seeks to blur the concepts of the natural and the artificial. In the Bamboo Garden at Erie Street Plaza, for example, groundwater is converted into steam to create an artificial microclimate in order to sustain a bamboo grove in winter and offer respite for winter joggers. In the case of the Riem Landscape Park, intensity suppression is exemplified by a strategy of excluding certain vegetal/ecological types, and by rigorous control of quantity and arrangement. Here, Grooming lies primarily within site preparation, controlling the launch of the system during the moment of greatest site manipulation. Paradoxically, the success predicated on the techniques that are used to inhibit dynamism creates a dramatic show of seasonality and mimicry of a pristine system. Anticipating these effects early on in the design process achieves the elimination of excessive post-construction management. This living system challenges the conventional notions of control versus resilience, of who or what is in control; instead, it posits whether a landscape can be designed to self-propagate, or self-prune. The plasticity of landscape systems is hence defined within the concepts of control of intensity and frequency, as in the function of a sound equalizer. The projects presented are gathered under the guise of adjusting amplification and suppression.
