| Summary: | This body of work began as an exploration of the University of Manitoba’s Southwood Lands (a former eighteen-hole golf course), with the intention of proposing something new for the site. However, analysis and critical thinking led to the realization that there was a need to not only look at the Southwood Lands, but also the entire Fort Garry Campus.
The work evolved through a process of discovery, using a variety of methods from walking the site, documentation through photography, visits to the archives to uncover history, and mapping from afar.
One of the underlying objectives was to highlight the importance of taking additional time to understand a place prior to making decisions, revealing what makes a place unique, where the opportunities are, and what has been hidden over time. The idea of a site being a blank slate is dismissed, drawing on the importance of found conditions in decision making.
Looking deeper into a place also leads to a greater respect for what is already there. It is what we already have that is so often discarded, and seen as having no value in decision making (the natural areas in a city or the trees on a former golf course for example). It is also the ecosystems that are seen as scrubby and unkept that are the most complex systems and richest spaces for life. Once complex, biologically rich systems are erased there is no going back to them.
It is the existing conditions that are worth taking the extra time to investigate, a process that must occur prior to making design decisions that seek to remove or make new. It is only though looking, and looking carefully with un-objective eyes, and an open mind, that design can truly enhance what we already have.
This practicum works under the premise that landscape has value in its own right. The landscape is not empty space, not just a place to put buildings, not a luxury that can easily be cut from budgets, and certainly not something that can be considered an afterthought. Instead, landscape is valued as something which is working and active, an essential part of life on this planet that is becoming increasingly important with a rapidly changing climate.
The intellectual foundation for organizing ideas around approaching the site have been interpreted from Christophe Girot’s ‘Four Trace Concepts in Landscape Architecture’. They are in this order: landing, grounding, finding, and founding.
While Girot’s four trace concepts organize ideas around approaching the site, there are three underlying principles that guide the entire body of work:
1. Landscape as infrastructure and organizing system;
2. Design as a process of discovery;
3. Investigation through multiple scales of inquiry.
A strategy for the Fort Garry Campus is where this work concludes, followed by reflections on the importance of context in design and the lessons learned throughout the practicum process.
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