THINKING ABOUT LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE
it is the site itself that may suggest a design concept, an idea that develops into a concrete design. Investigating the history of the site and its context and the people and cultures that were prominent during this history might suggest a design concept. An old street layout or historical landscape features such as an old irrigation canal or drainage swale might be the wellspring for a design solution. Historical precedents (previously built examples) have been a source of inspiration down through the ages, perhaps beginning with the Garden of Eden. The two garden spaces shown in Figure 5.1 are a palpable example of where a historical precedent such as the great lawn at Parc de Sceaux in Paris (Figure 5.1A) and many similar gardens, designed with long vistas developed around a simple panel of lawn bordered by trees, has been adapted to other public and private gardens as shown in the contemporary public open space situated within a dense mixed-use neighborhood in Paris in Figure 5.1B. A discussion attempting to pinpoint where design ideas come from is a slippery, at best intellectual, enterprise. To understand the slippery nature of the topic we will review a number of design sources that have informed and been successfully applied by landscape architects.
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Figure 5.1 Use of historic precedents as a source of design inspiration: A: Parc de Sceaux by André Le Nôtre outside of Paris; B: A mixed-use residential neighborhood also in Paris.
Landscape as Narratives
People of all ages like a good story. Think about the evenings when bedtime stories were read to you. Sometimes at your insistence particular stories were read repeatedly evening after evening. The use of storytelling is an approach not only to convey information but also to generate visual imagery. The words in the hands of a skilled author can create visual images for the reader. The reader “sees” from the words put down on paper or told in the verbal reading of the text. There are many examples where the landscape architect has selected or derived a story that was the basis of a design. The story or narrative provided the organizing framework of elements contained in the design that when explained (told) can be seen and understood by the client and others. Following are some examples of design landscapes based on narratives.
Pershing Square, Los Angeles, CA The office of the Olin Partnership in Philadelphia, PA, was the landscape architect for the design of the latest version of Pershing Square in downtown Los Angeles, California (Figure 5.2). The design is composed of an arrangement of interconnected spaces meant to symbolically showcase the cultural and natural history of the Southern California region, beginning with the Spanish Colonial
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