Drawing Experiments for Representing Landscape

Abstract

Since 2006, Balmori Associates Landscape and Urban Design, based in New York City, has been divided into two parts. The first is a landscape practice that investigates landscape as a constructed space. The second part, BAL/LAB, is a collection of research and experiments. Collaborations across disciplines, exploration of new technologies, projects invented by us, temporary projects, floating landscape, and the zero-waste city are some of the BAL/LABs. Another of them deals with the challenges of representing landscape. In landscape architecture, representation has become the subject of contention and much discussion. While 3D modelling and rendering software have been a catalyst for change across the field of design, nowhere have the conventions of representation been called into question more than in landscape architecture—which is undergoing a process of reinvention. With the onset of rapid urbanization and our shifting relationship with nature, landscape architecture has proved a potent lens for expressing a wider dialogue taking place in the world. It is, however, only through the introduction of innovative forms of representation—whether digital, analogue, or hybrid—that one most vividly sees the emergence of the new.