Description
Process is the vehicle of manifestation. It takes myriad forms––methodical, messy, intuitional, and rational. While purposeful, process is rarely linear, nor are its yields predictable. The very power of process lies in deliberately withholding expectations for a prescribed result.
The discipline of landscape architecture is invested in process beyond the creative act of design. Our work is fundamentally temporal; it draws from a palette of materials in flux. In the landscape, biotic and abiotic substances are rarely static. Our practice engages with sites that shift, flood, wither, and bloom. Methods draw from diverse fields of inquiry. Our processes take form as interdisciplinary endeavors of collective becoming.
In this sixth issue of GROUND UP Journal, we have sought out testimonies of process with the hope of better comprehending our own. The following pages contain a diverse collection of narratives, from encounters with landscapes of inequality to musings on the relationship between science and design, from the evolution of a planting plan to a synaesthetic investigation of Queens, New York. These testimonies are often less concerned with conclusions than with rising action, complications, and reversals, moments obscured in the final deliverable.
Together, these singular threads coalesce into a reflective record on the role of process in our discipline. To document a process is an act of recovery which begins by looking back. We have found, however, that the continued examination and critique of process is often the surest way to move forward.