Winter 2010

Conway School of Landscape DesignGraduate Program in Sustainable Landscape Planning & Design

con text“Conserving the Common Ground: Landscape Ethics and the Art of Observation” | Rick Darke, p. 9

Design with Legacy Ecologies

16 con text

Students’ Writing

Exploring the Edges of Planning and Design Research by Conway StudentsDuring the school year Conway students research a wide range of topics related to landscape planning and design. Some of these topics are somewhat outside the traditional domain of landscape designers and may prove especially interesting to readers. Excerpts from three research papers are included here, considering sound in the landscape, mobile media, and human excreta. Full texts are published on the school’s website: www.csld.edu/whatsnew.htm.

ew places assault the senses like a casino. Built to dazzle, disorient, and overwhelm, the lights

flash maniacally, the machines sing gleefully, and the din never stops. Sharp angles, jangling sounds, and textured chips send the message that it’s a good idea to indulge in games of chance. Compare that setting to a bank’s. The exterior and interior of a bank could hardly send a more dissimilar mes-sage—banks look, sound, and feel entirely different. Colors and voices are muted, design is reassuring, and risk is neither celebrated nor acknowledged (until you get to the small print).

Lastly, consider an outdoor public place, such as a plaza or park. It is easy to imagine what we expect to see, but rarely can we imagine what we expect to hear. Without a positive or negative sonic point of attention, like a fountain or a jackham-mer, little comes to mind, no matter how enjoyable or unbearable the experience we have in mind. But very few of the sounds we hear can be considered a sonic point of attention, so those can’t be the only things contributing to the quality of our experience of a place. In asking some simple questions about the nature of sonic elements and their place in a public open space, we can get closer to understand-ing the nature and necessity of those elements in a designed landscape.

Designing for sound is considered a largely acoustic venture, concerned with the amplification and manipulation of a sonic origin (usually a stage with actors, politicians, musicians, or other per-formers), the even distribution of the desired sound/music throughout an enclosed space, or the reduc-tion and neutralization of unwanted noise. Vitru-vius discusses the former aspect of sound design in

F the fifth book of The Ten Books of Architecture: “Particular pains must be taken that the site [is] one through which the voice can range with the greatest clearness.” This perspective does not ad-dress the issue of sound as a design element; rather, it is a design goal (by no means a simple one).

In order to design with sound, and not merely for it, it is necessary to establish the positive contribu-tions sound makes to our enjoyment of place. In his 1953 essay, “Notes on City Satisfactions,” Kevin Lynch discusses “the psychological and sensual effects of the physical form of the city” and loosely identifies the positive “satisfactions” a city can bestow as Orientation, Warmth, Stimulus, Sensual Delight, and Interest. Lynch considers sound a con-tributor to both Orientation and Sensual Delight. In the former, it is “the sense of ‘city’ from bells, the urban hum, etc.,” while in the case of the latter, sounds have pleasant connotations: “the natural ‘rhythmical’ ones (waves, leaves in the wind); those indicative of not too intense human activity (voices, feet); and those musical in nature (bells, singing).”

As for the satisfaction of Sensual Delight, sound is admitted in three forms: natural, human (but not musical), and musical. In the latter we can expect a great deal more cultural signifiers: blues spilling out of the jook joints on Beale Street, or calls to prayer issuing from the minarets of Istanbul. These are deliberate elements that will stand on their own. But the sounds of natural forces and human activity—of raindrop, birdcall, engine, footstep, laugh, and die-sel engine—these incidental sounds can be courted, and given a place to stand out or contribute quietly.

The sounds of human activity are powerful, and a parallel can be drawn to Lynch’s claim that “the

An Unseen Component BY JONATHAN COOPER

con text 17

Students’ Writing

useums were the first major institutions to turn towards mobile audio tours in an effort

to meet the demands of visitors in a cost-effective and user-friendly way.

In addition to audio segments, a second compo-nent of mobile media is the ability to employ global positioning systems’ (GPS) data, images, or video into tours resulting in a truly dynamic experience completely adaptable to the user. GPS maps can be used to navigate a site or find specific exhibits or services. Videos and images can provide additional information not on display.

Canada’s Banff National Park is leading the way in mobile media wilderness exploration. Their pilot study, Tracklines, is a cell-phone-based GPS project which provides interactive mapping for park visitors, conveys up-to-date information on wildlife sight-ings, data on flora (what is in bloom, etc.), and al-lows people to record their findings on a centralized database, thus expanding the eyes and ears of the park service. Hikers use “GPS smart phones to navi-gate a mountainous landscape seeded by locus with stories.” This type of interpretive hike is referred to as a “walkumentary,” a combination of wilderness walking and trail guide information, with both old patterns of storytelling and new innovations of mo-bile media delivery. Harkening back to the lost art of oral storytelling, this new mechanism for collecting and communicating oral traditions has the ability to make narratives of place relevant and topical.

There has been a proliferation of grassroots guer-rilla tours. The Internet has allowed anyone with a recording device to produce and upload a home-made tour of their own. Some of these unsanctioned narratives called “sound seeing” have garnered mass popularity through the virtual bulletin board

M of the Internet. Many users are attracted to the rawness of these streams and freedom of expression they represent. This growing trend allows the public to respond to and shape culture and blur the line between author and audience.

Yellow Arrow is a multi-city urban mass media project wherein people record stories about places by leaving recordings on a centralized record-ing device via mobile phones. In this way, Yellow Arrow weaves curated tours of specific cities into the landscape and provides the ability to browse thousands of single points of interest submitted by people. Visual cues (a yellow arrow) signal to others the presence of narrative. People then call the cen-tral number and hear people telling their narratives of place.

Perhaps the most exciting aspect of a project such as this is the ability for numerous streams of narrative to overlap and interrelate. For example, someone may upload a comment about or reaction to something of concern in their neighborhood, such as a new building development. Other people who are privy to the narrative can then weigh in on the topic and in this way a dialogue may ensue that might not otherwise take place. Ultimately, this form of communication may galvanize the interests of people within a neighborhood or across towns or states and create a coalition of concerned citizens combining their shared views towards a common goal. In summary, this type of media-based nar-rative allows for a diversity of voices to share in a common experience and create a distinct voice made up of the individual strands that share in the narrative. And in this way, a diverse tapestry of user-derived narratives can overlap and create a meta-narrative greater than the sum of its parts.

Mobile Media BY ARAN WIENER

sight of people and their activity is a fundamen-tal impression.” It doesn’t seem unreasonable to extend that fundamental impression to the sounds of people and their activity. Our auditory attraction to the sounds of people helps to confirm the value of our own presence and to affirm our understand-ing of what goes on, where it goes on, and how it goes on. As people, we are as much a part of this

aleatoric “pattern” as anyone: our shoes scrape the pavement, we hum a few bars, shift our weight in a chair, and fold back the newspaper page.

No one is in need of a new cacophony, or grand statement where there wasn’t one before. Rather, the goal as a designer is to find sounds that may or may not exist in the place, and bring them forward to inculcate that wonderful human act of noticing.

26 con text

Students’ Projects: 2008–2009

Qualitative inventory of the Southern Mosaic Trails

The overriding issue facing Walden Pond State Reservation is how to maintain a dynamic balance between recreation and preservation of the natural environment. Preserving cultural resources while making them available to the public must also be

balanced. The interplay of these dynamics affects the quality of the visitor’s experience, as does the quality of interpretive structures, the aesthetic quali-ties of the constructed environment, and the ease and safety with which visitors can access the features of the reservation.

In drafting the stewardship plan, Conway students reviewed previous studies and their recommenda-tions and implementation; interviewed Department of Conservation and Recreation staff and members of the Walden Pond Advisory Board; researched histori-cal archives; communicated with outside experts; and conducted field observations of existing conditions.

The plan proposes stewardship management zones based on the intensity of visitor use and on environ-mental conditions. The distinct conditions in each of these zones guide park staff in setting management priorities across the reservation. Specific recommen-dations are made for each zone, ranging from improv-ing pedestrian crossings to creating a preserve and control area. General recommendations across zones range from continuing erosion-mitigation programs, improving trails by reconstruction where necessary, improving wayfinding on trails by installing signs and markers, installing new or enhancing existing inter-pretive structures, and protecting wetland habitat.

Draft Walden Pond State Reservation Stewardship PlanConcord, Massachusetts Designers: Jonathan Cooper, Kyle Haley, and Randy Marks

Winter 2009

This year, the Conway School had the honor of working on two projects for the Walden Pond State Reservtion. Jonathan Cooper, Kyle Haley, and Randy Marks researched and wrote a draft Walden Pond State Reservation Stewardship Plan for the Mas-sachusetts Department of Conservation and Recre-ation (DCR) in the winter term. Jenna Webster and Aran Wiener created an Interpretive Facilities Master Plan for the DCR in the spring term. Both projects address the question of how to make a significant cultural site accessible and legible to a large num-ber of visitors while encouraging stewardship in a small space with sensitive environmental conditions.

Stewardship zones

Q:How can a culturally significant natural site be made accessible to the public while protecting sensitive environments?

School NewsClass of 2009 on fall trip. Back row: Brian Markey, Sara Preston, Alex Hoffmeier, Sarah Mitchell, Aran Wiener, Randy Marks, Erik Johson;middle row: Lucie Martin, Cyndy Fine, Ashley Pelletier, Katharine Gehron, Fiona Dunbar, Kate Benisek, Rachel Bechhoefer;front row: Suzanne Lyn Rhodes, Paul Cawood Hellmund (Director), Michael Blacketer, Kyle Haley, Jenna Webster, Jonathan Cooper, Ken Byrne (Faculty)

Conway School of Landscape Design332 South Deerfield Road

P.O. Box 179

Conway, MA 01341

ADDRESS SERVICE REQUESTED

NON-PROFIT ORGU.S. Postage

PAIDPermit No. 4

No. Hatfield, MA

This issue of con’text was printed with the flexographic process, which uses recycled water-based inks, no solvents, and produces very low waste.