Bridget Snaith, as Programme Leader for Landscape Architecture at the University of East London, writing for ‘Landscape’ professional journal of the Landscape Institute (pub Autumn 2018)
“Unlike the painter, the musician, the sculptor, or the traditional gardener, the landscape architect rarely has the opportunity to significantly touch and mould the landscape medium as it plays out in response to intervention. ….. caught at a peculiar distance from these same elements, working instead with a completely different medium that we call drawing. Creative access to the landscape is therefore remote and indirect, masked by a two dimensional screen. “
Corner, J; Bick Hirsch, A (eds) (2014) The Landscape Imagination. Princeton Architectural Press, pp163
UEL’s visit to the Landscape Institute drawings collection at the Museum of English Rural Life in Reading last spring proved to be a key moment of insight for our Conversion Year students, and not just in discovering that even leading professional’s drawings do not emerge as perfect finished pieces. The film and tracing paper drawings from for example, Sylvia Crowe, Sir Jeffrey Jellicoe or Brenda Colvin with multiple scratchings out and collaged amendments spoke eloquently of how drawings are worked at, reconfigured , and radically amended over a project’s evolution, in iterative processes involving other collaborators, and the client. These drawings stand in stark contrast to the polished images on Pinterest or practice websites that were the reference point students previously had access to.
The visit also proved instrumental in unlocking a meaningful connection for many between theory and professional practice. Our visit came about as part of our second semester theory and professional practice module. The module brings together seemingly disparate topics - a placement in one of several landscape offices in and around London; a series of lectures on landscape history and culture, exploring the development of ideas and different understandings and representations of nature; study of public plantings; and a technical study investigating and aspect of construction.
The connection was made through drawing. We asked the students to reflect on five drawings, at least two in the collection at MERL, which spans UK landscape practice across the whole twentieth century, reflecting cultural shifts in technology and style, and at least one drawing from the practice where they were placed. They were to critically review James Corner’s thoughts on drawing in Landscape Architecture, considering ideas such as ‘Projection’, ’Notation’ or ‘Representation’, and explore the ways in which drawings may be conceived as symbolic, or instrumental, metaphorical or analytical. Extracts of two students responses to this brief, inspired by Sylvia Crowe’s portfolio are included here, together with photographs of the drawings to which they refer.
Harvey Erhard, MA Professional Landscape Architecture, (Conversion), University of East London
Though Crowe’s drawing is intended to read as a construction diagram it has been embellished with a huge variety of gestural mark making in pencil to represent the variety of planting. Many modern plans utilising CAD simply adopt plain circle or shape outlines to show the diameter of a canopy/plant spread…Crowe’s plan does go in to the realm of fine art and mark making.
The planting could have been read just as easily if it were plain or even diagrammatic. However, the gestural mark making does not inhibit the plans readability. I find the humanistic qualities engaging.
Corner references an ink drawing by 15th Century Japanese artist Sesshu, made by a process of flinging ink at a canvas … how these gestures could stir the viewers imagination -
‘The flung-ink (although it could be any graphic medium, some much richer such as tempera or oil paints) begins the process by opening up a synesthetic “field,” a metaphorically suggestive realm that prompts an imaginative seeing.’ (Corner, 2014).
In Crowe’s plan you sense a difference in the fluidity and control of drawing certain plants. You get a sense of flow and uncertainty of movement, smudges over hard lines, ambiguity. Perhaps this ambiguity is useful for the viewer to fill in with their imagination much in the same was as Sesshu’s ambiguity...
Lisa Peachey, PGDip Landscape Architecture, University of East London
Corner talks about drawing as a “vehicle of creativity” notational drawing and construction. He doesn’t talk about drawing as seeing, as shown [in the drawing of Waterloo Wood] by Crowe. Here her rapid, expressive lines and annotations
suggest a drawing “in the field”.
My fine art training taught me to believe that drawing is a mechanism to help you see the world; to enable you to understand your own lack of understanding, and to try to educate yourself about the notion of preconception and your own blind spots. Most of the time we move through space without seeing. It is this seeing part of drawing that I think could be further explored within Landscape.
Precedents found as images online are not the same as sitting observing a landscape. While I do believe that looking at a drawing can give you a variety of experience of a space, I also believe that drawing a space can give you an experience.
There is an emphasis on the Landscape architect’s “vision” This should come from the process of looking, not by its absence.