Field exercises: Fid-Bau Portal

Field exercises

Jenkins, Katherine

Recent publications within landscape architecture discourse lament the profession's deference to digital technology and its coincident retreat from the physical landscape during the design phase. In translating this criticism into practice, I have cultivated a method of site analysis and exploratory representation that promotes direct engagement in the field while piloting empirical tools that record open-air encounters.

Field Exercises uses several instruments simultaneously to visualize how a path of movement responds to specific terrestrial and seasonal conditions. While each walk is shaped by variations in the environment, the site itself is modified by the passage of the designer through it. This mutually influential encounter between designer and site is charted through geospatial data and a chronological sequence of aerial photographs produced with a weather balloon that can be overlaid and read together. The resulting sitemap situates the designer's physical experience in the field relative to the specific conditions that give rise to it.

All imagery used in the design process is generated by the designer and is temporally and climatically specific, obviating the need for landscape simulacra such as found images and synthetic models. The concurrent acts of moving through the landscape and registering these movements produce an experience that is both physically perceived and rationally constructed.