walking as reproduction
exhibitions | sequences by lisa rapoport plant architect inc
At one time all mapping was a product of walking at a very slow measured pace. With the twenty-first century facilitating instantaneous pictorial high definition views at the click of a button, mapping has nearly excluded time from the experience of reading maps and reading place. Time is a key factor in our work at PLANT Architect, which frequently focuses on experiencing landscapes by walking, rather than through encounters with singular buildings. The experiences are both narrative and filmic. In 2012 we explored the problem of recapturing time within the depiction of our own work in two nearly concurrent installations – one in Venice 2, one in Cambridge, Ontario 3: : the Podium Roof Garden at Nathan Phillips Square 4 , and the Dublin Grounds of Remembrance in Ohio –both projects with long walks at the core of their design. Catering to typical needs of architectural publications, these projects have been visually described with photographs of only the most dramatic moments. This is nothing new. Depictions of an architect’s work typically focus on highlights – the most striking and complex and consumable views – just like the traveller who shares highlights of their voyage but who omits the long train rides in between. …every walk is unreproducable, as is every poem. Even if you walk exactly the same route every day – as with a sonnet – the events along the route cannot be imagined to be the same from day to day…. If a poem is each time new, then it is necessarily an act of discovery, a chance taken, a chance that may lead to fulfilment or disaster. – A R Ammons,‘A Poem is a Walk’ 1
landscapes walking stopping seeing recording
Our unease with the singular drama shots began more than twenty years ago with our Sweet Farm project – architectural interventions for looking at the landscape. The focus of most of our depictions of the project was of the objects for looking at the landscape, rather than the landscape itself. The landscape seemed so nuanced that we did not entirely understand how to photograph the experience of it. The nuanced in-between, however, is what interested us most. For the last twenty years our practice has been developing landscapes that explore how the choreography of a space links physical engagement with the sites’ meaning. The activation of linkages reveals site, space, history and ecologies, enhances community ritual while creating loci for gathering. We believe that walking common ground creates public heritage through action. Walking helps us measure ourselves against the earth. Walking connects our bodies with our imaginations. Walking becomes a way of understanding, revealing and forming site. Walking acknowledges time as a significant factor of experience. ‘ …walking is a mode of making the world as well as being in it. ’ 5
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1 Originally published in Epoch 18 (Fall 1968): 114-19; delivered to the International Poetry Forum in Pittsburgh in April 1967. 2 In August of 2012, PLANT was invited to present at the 13th Biennale of Architecture in Venice, as part of an exhibition entitled Traces of Centuries & Future Steps at the Palazzo Bembo. 3 PLANT was one of three participants in 3ByLAND , part of the Common Ground exhibit in the summer of 2012, at Cambridge Galleries. The commission included site-specific installations in downtown Cambridge, as well as the gallery exhibit.
4 The Podium Roof Garden is part of the larger project for the revitalisation of Nathan Phillips Square. The project was won by international competition in 2007 by PLANT Architect Inc in Joint Venture with Perkins+Will Canada, and with Peter Lindsay Schaudt Landscape Architecture Inc and Adrian Blackwell Urban Projects. 5 From Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit, 2001. p29
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