Architecture

While the garden is an immersive medium, it rarely diminishes the distinction between human and that which exists beyond the skin. Gardens require human’s perpetual management and thus, to some extent, control, of the biophysical world. When this control is surrendered, plants – once coddled – begin to engulf the landscape.

This paper introduces a fully immersive garden - a garden that likewise engulfs or cloaks the visitor - providing a seamless vegetative blanket that both insulates and unifies. By allowing ourselves to be fully engulfed in the garden, we release control and become part of our habitational field rather than separate from it. Responding to the performance art lineage, clothing oneself in the garden becomes part of the engagement process, as does the collective act of wearing this common cloak, creating a new topography based on shared experience.

The term “diaspora” connotes a dynamic social formation—a process of settlement and a tenuous sense of belonging based on the negotiation between the collective memory of home and responsive adaptations to host locales. While a global phenomenon, the local impact of shifting patterns of settlement in the multicultural city transforms urban spaces through the varied and overlapping inscriptions of new and adapted rituals. Using a Landscape Architecture studio conducted at the University of Toronto as the experimental means through which to investigate diasporic and transnational urban settlement and its implications for design, this paper focuses on final proposals for the case study site—a particular area of contestation in Queens, New York—as well as the pedagogical methodology used to generate them.

This article considers the continued agency of the body in movement as an active means of reading and reimagining the urban landscape. Using a design study, which reconsiders the gridded island of Manhattan through a walk down Broadway, the article introduces an activist landscape design methodology where field-walking as exploratory mapping yields multilinear narratives to generate landscape futures. The article begins with a description of this study, then transitions into its broader situation within and implications for landscape architectural methodology.

Can landscapes be moved? What does it mean for a landscape not to have a place when the former is often equated with the latter in geographical terms? The following essay considers the relevance and resonance of place (and space) as related to landscapes of memory. By considering the increasing digitization of memory via the burgeoning geoweb, we aim to explore the future of memorial-making, which has long been a physical and material practice that treats site as a remnant of authenticity. While monuments often commemorate events that occurred elsewhere, landscapes themselves are frequently all that remains of histories long forgotten. The following considers whether these landscapes can be captured, transported and inscribed in the social imagination (as cultural memory) as an ex situ experience. We conclude with three illustrative memorial propositions and emphasize how geospatial media might be harnessed in contemporary memorial-making to transport us virtually to sites of memory and transport memorial landscapes into the space of our everyday lives. These propositions rely on the adaptability and accretional nature of new media technologies to commemorate ongoing processes of loss. Rather than commemorate the singularity of sites as uniquely sacred, these technologies enable awareness of larger networks of memory that draw people together across geographies and “chasms of difference.”