A recent review of student work at Hong Kong University with Professor Dorothy Tang elicited striking correlations to some of our recent posts on Ecology, Art and Science.  Check out these beautiful projects that exhibit critical analysis and striking formal synthesis.

The physical appearance of landscape patterns are dictated by internal logics or external operations responding to site, climate, physics, chemistry, and geometries. Students at the University of Hong Kong analyzed an existing landscape pattern through its geometry, formation, site, and boundaries in order to understand the operations that condition its physical form.  These operations include climatic forces (sun, wind, rain), access to water (irrigation), interruptions and barriers (snow fences, water’s edge), mechanical limitations (turning radius on a road), and cultural political norms (land subdivision).  These patterns are typically adaptable to its context, flexible in function, and ephemeral in form.

Rules and Operations

After understanding the operations and processes that form the chosen landscape pattern, students then apply their knowledge to manipulate certain parameters and re-create a unique landscape surface that is not simply a 2D pattern, but begin to take on 3 dimensional qualities.

STEP 1: Identify a landscape pattern

STEP 2: Find operational parameters

STEP 3: Generate new pattern

STEP 4: Create a Thick 2D

Patterning

From the shifting sands of the Gobi Desert, the Alaskan kettle lakes formed by glacial retreats, to rice terraces in western China and Bingham Canyon Mine in Utah, students interrogated unfamiliar territories and landscape processes through observation, research, and drawing.  These landscape operations vary in time, scale, degree of human intervention, and natural processes. Jason Ng discovered Bolivian villages that subdivided land equally in a radial pattern and applied that principle on a landscape with extreme topography; Esther Fung photographed ice melting under various external forces to simulate the formation of kettle lakes;  Lance Wong obsessed over slopes and turning radiuses to design a beautiful mine-dump; Alex Lee inverted the logics of rice terraces into a new topographical form; Vicky Lam regularized river channel migration over time; and Twiggy Ngo manipulated wind erosion patterns in the desert.

Landscape patterns are shaped by a multitude of complex forces and are impossible to model or simulate accurately.  One can only speculate the potential outcomes of the application of certain operations on the landscape—it is an open-ended system.  Despite these limitations, the reinterpretation of these processes could still yield inventions of form and space that are responsive and adaptive to a constantly shifting  landscape—a material landscape that acknowledges the complexities of time and change.

Acknowledgements

“Patterning Landscapes” is the result of student explorations at the University of Hong Kong during the fall term of 2011.  Third year undergraduate students in the Division of Landscape Architecture embarked on this 3 week investigation of landscape form and operations as an introduction to their landscape planning studio.  All images are courtesy of the University of Hong Kong.

See Stan Alan’s article “Mat Urbanism: The Thick 2-D” in CASE: Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital and the Mat Building Revival edited by Hashim S