Point of departure : landscape, memory and change as passage for design

Abstract

This thesis is the exploration of the natural and cultural environment through design. The natural landscape is a richly complex system reliant on interdependencies, change, and renewal. It is laden with multiple, even contradictory interpretations, yet it is one of intimate associations and often pastoral repose. Unlike the often static, simplistic order of the human environment, the natural environment is understood and enjoyed through formal and interactive relationships set in an emerging process of time. As such, a very positive reference for societies' state can be found in observing and transforming all evolving landscape that surrounds, nourishes, and defines us. The landscape, the "point of departure," becomes meaningful in its expression of the perpetual possibility of an occurrence, change or design. The vehicle for this investigation is a design projection for a small park in conjunction with the 1992 summer Olympic Games in Barcelona, Spain. The programmatic requirements are to supply temporary exhibit space for the Olympic/global ideal and to function as a formal and pedestrian link between the closed formal axis of the city and its extension to the Olympic Stadium. A strong design concern is the interpretation of the site as a temporal, spatial, and formal continuum of what existed before, the needs during the three week Olympic celebration, and its return to a daily routine as a new botanical garden. The first section is an elaboration of the relativistic character of the natural environment and its reference to both the process of design and the human experience. The second section describes the site in terms of landscape, its formal attributes and its place in geographic time. The third section describes the site in terms of memory, autobiographical and cultural time, the impact of man's relation to nature, and the specific plastic effects that it has had on the existing condition and form. The last section reveals the site in terms of change, or both the literal and lyrical passage of design. This part synoptically describes the temporal and formal configuration between what was, what is, and what might be.