Moving across the Terrain: Perceiving and performing the landscape

Abstract

This research brings into focus a rich cross-disciplinary dialogue between performance studies and landscape architecture. As a research and pedagogical investigation, it reveals possibilities for advancing how designers might integrate performative methodologies into site research. Typical site research methods are predicated upon the use of media remote from the physical terrain, such as maps, drawings and three-dimensional models. These modes of representation are necessary for landscape architects because they enable the scale of landscape, which generally far exceeds that of the human body, to be made physically accessible to the designer. Performative strategies can be used to develop navigational tools for sharpening the body’s perceptive capacity within vast landscapes. These strategies are unpacked across the article’s three sections. Un-distancing discusses questions of representation and suggests that embodied modes of drawing can connect the designer more directly and deeply with the land as their medium; Measuring as Performance explores the act of measuring the land itself as a performance; and Figured Ground considers the body as an active agent in the shaping of the ground. These performative strategies were tested in the context of a landscape architecture design studio at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Students were taken on a field trip to Death Valley National Park and surrounding areas located near the border of California and Nevada in the Western United States. In this region the raw beauty of texture, colour and light illuminates the vastness of this landscape as it is perceived through the tactile, visual, auditory and kinaesthetic senses. Immersing themselves in a series of embodied exercises under the theme of Moving Across the Terrain the students’ moving bodies became perceptive instruments that enabled them, both individually and collectively, to ‘measure’ the landscape and experience scale, topography and time in visceral ways.