Walking, hutting and mapping: a landscape architectural investigation into the generative potential of experience's 'other'

Abstract

For landscape architecture, experience is a fundamental dimension of designing, but an elusive one. My research focuses on experience, asking “Given a research context which is ‘made’ in interacting, (through mapping) what operative place does and could the on-ground, in-site experience have?” I adopt an immersive, responsive and evolving design process which places primacy on both experience and landscape as activity. Through the creation of a dynamic part-physical and part-intangible mapping practice, this work examines the generative possibilities for Landscape Architecture in designing enriched experiences from an experience.

In taking this experiential focus, I use a perspective of the individual’s experience as an external entity: accruing, fleshing and revealing more of ‘Its’-self. This perspective also considers the landscape as a spatio-temporal realm in which this ‘entity’ exists. As the particularities of site and perceiver come together, through interacting these concepts of experience and landscape begin to transform, adopting a perpetual state of becoming.

This research follows a design-directed process, guided by a reciprocating dialogue between designer and experience. Each stage of this process is generated by the preceding stage, grounded by theoretical positions and developed frameworks. The overarching methods begin with the generating of a site-based experience in Lake Sumner Forest Park. The operative, explorative and projective conditions of interpretive mapping, are employed to de-familiarise the ‘content’ of this experience in order to get beyond habitual response. Several relationships, connections and shifted conceptualisations are revealed in doing so. These inform and propagate a range of design interventions.

This research activates graphic representation and finds success in a part-diagram part-image system, sensitive to and capable of transforming with and conveying of experiential content. Secondly, it generates a tool-system which holds merit in its ability to translate ingrained subjective and sub-conscious processing into observable and spatially-organisable experiential data. Thirdly, this thesis challenges the understanding of ‘site’, finding generative possibilities in operationalising the phenomena of site interaction. Lastly, this work positions the landscape architectural designer as a translator, finding purchase in a designing perspective with-and-of-the-experience.

This work proposes future scope in the investigation of landscape-driven experiences, both in what they reveal of enacted perspectives and conceptualisations of site, and in their potential to be a platform for change. Mapping, as a method developed from this work, holds possibilities in its re-application to alternative contexts, further experiences, micro-experience, and experienced design interventions. Given a challenging of several assumptions, mapping as a method both for critique and further design generating, proposes an infinite potential in the unveiling of on-ground and in-site experiencing. Finally, my research highlights the potential for the role of the Landscape Architect in designing from ̶ and through ̶ a subjectively motivated process.