form and settlement the social construction of landscape
research | north atlantic rim research collaborative by elizabeth shotton
Ireland Nova Scotia Iceland Norway drawing culture architecture
1 Halten, Norway 2 Arnarstapi, Iceland 3 Lahinch, Ireland 4 Peggy’s Cove, Nova Scotia
landscape : topography, geology, vegetation, material resources, climate, and the culture that ensues from it. architecture : the built expression of both place and people. project: research the critical immediacy between building and landscape; how intimately architecture can be informed by place. four places : Nova Scotia, coastal Norway, Iceland and Ireland, with enough similarities in landscape and subtle differences in material resources, climate and culture to make comparisons across them invaluable. four architecture schools that form North Atlantic Rim [NAR] Research Collaborative: University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway. Dalhousie University in Halifax. University College Dublin, Ireland. Academy of the Arts: Architecture and Design in Reykjavik, Iceland.
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NAR’s series of cross-cultural studies of coastal settlements on the north Atlantic started in 2004 with initial drawing and documentation studies of coastal landscapes and settlements in Norway and Ireland. It continued the following year in Iceland, and concluded the first phase in Nova Scotia in 2006. The project has examined natural landscapes, altered landscapes, historic and contemporary building responses to these conditions, and the relationship between material resources and building form. North Atlantic coastal landscapes face significant development pres- sures and environmental threats to their fragile ecosystems, land- forms and settlements. Conte drawings from the scale of landscape to building form and detail [page 16], scaled aerial drawings of each region, and site photography have formed a basis for comparisons, identifying salient issues of culture and settlement patterns, land- scape and its relevance to built form. NAR’s project parallels Richard Saul Wurman’s work with design students at the University of North Carolina, later made into a small book called Cities: Comparisons of Form & Scale (1963). His representa- tion of city form in sand castings inspired NAR’s study of landscape and settlement in drawings. Wurman’s thesis was that ‘the healthy existence of cities is the degree to which the beginnings of a particular city is apparent’. NAR’s focus reaches further back to the primacy of landscape to understand its critical relevance in shaping the form
of human culture and settlement. While Wurman’s work responded to the underlying pressures on city development during the mid- to late-twentieth century, environment is key to our present and future evolution, allied to current issues of sustainability. Robert Thayer, in Gray World, Green Heart: Technology, Nature, and the Sustainable Landscape , proposes that ‘surface versus core’ is one of the most fundamental ways to understand landscape. Describing the ever widening dislocation between these two, he proposes that surface values are based on what is in front of us. As a visually-trained profes- sion we see the surface condition of landscape, and work to reveal its poetic beauty through our remaking of its surface through building. Difficult to achieve and admirable when realized, it is the manner in which young architects are trained and old architects work. However, it does not engage the core. Core values are those hidden conditions of the land, its ecological and material processes — the operative level of landscape. Re-linking those processes construed as natural and those construed as made, challenges the surface-core dichotomy with a more holistic picture of continuity and interdependence — landscape as the thing that holds us. Sustainability as a reading of core, of processes and interrelation- ships, was commonplace until technology and industry severed this understanding.
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