Unfamiliar Territory_Research

More specifically, the research has five main objectives:
- to propose a methodological transgression of reading the site in terms of processes and relations present on
site and to look at landscape’s specificity in the context of territoriology
- to explore alternative modes of ‘representation’ that would embody the character of the site instead of relying
on conventional landscape representational tools and heuristic devices that inadequately address complexity
and metastability of landscape systems
- to question the role of an intervention and elaborate on ways landscape architecture could begin to see itself as
only one of the many agents working on site, in the moment of design emphasized and fundamental to the
actualisation of a designed assemblage but always already subservient to the processes it cannot fully delimit
- to move landscape experience from purely visual domain
- to contribute to the discourse and connect ideas of poststructuralism and posthumanism through the notion of
affect
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1.3 research questions
Main research question:
Inside an expanded field of landscape architecture, how can one read an unhomely landscape and
through defamiliarization/destabilization/deterritorialisation productively engage with disturbed sites,
now seen as landscape architecture’s ‘other’?
- expanded field of landscape architecture
Expanded field of landscape architecture is explored by Elizabeth Meyer through her version of the Klein group
diagram that firstly appeared in landscape architecture debates with Rosalind Krauss's use of the diagram to
describe how sculpture expanded its field in the 1960s. Meyer reconfigures the diagram to reconsider the
relations between "landscape and architecture, the unseen and the seen, the void and the mass." 16
Meyer's aim is to argue for a description of landscape architecture as a hybrid activity that operates in-between
dualities and avoids binary pairs as opposing conditions. Landscape is understood as a continuum and
becoming, as a spatial and temporal terrain. It allows for the rediscovery of the space in-between - space of
forces, processes and tensions, space of relationships between things, not of things alone.
"Instead of a static, visual landscape that is out there, irrational, irregular, and open, we have a spatial, temporal,
and ecological site that is present before an artist or a designer begins to work. The designer, then, allows the
site to speak more clearly through the design interventions he or she makes. The site and the designer are
collaborators." 17
16
Meyer, E. (1997). The Expanded Field of Landscape Architecture. In: G. Thompson and F. Steiner, ed., Ecological Design
and Planning, 1st ed. New York: John Wiley and Sons, pp.45-79.
17 Ibid., p.74
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