Trent Workman
Base of The Plan of the Dead Glacier mapped in chalk
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The movement of water traces and retraces a prehistoric path on the land. The Assiniboine River, which flows eastward across the Canadian prairies, is a fluvial remnant of a vast glacial lake that once covered the majority of the province of Manitoba. To see and experience this river first-hand is to synthesise the disparate time scales, human and geologic, operating in a singular moment. To oscillate between the deep time of the river and the anthropocentric transformations of the territory requires a shift in how one reads the landscape.
The act of ‘reading’ is an essential part of landscape architecture: radically subjective, it places the designer both in the landscape, to read, record and interpret, and also in the studio to represent and communicate. These initial, emotional responses to landscape provide a platform for design. The process of constructing The Plan of the Dead Glacier included here is my preliminary interpretation as a young designer of the geologic timescale in the prairie territory.
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