A Landscape Jury

Last week saw the Final Review and Presentation of the Post Graduate work in Landscape Architecture undertaken in the Academic year @ CEPT.

It was good to meet up again with a diverse panel of Architects and Landscape Architects as a part of the jury, apart from the two batches of the Department.

The Sem III exercise of a site with a perennial flooding problem saw a variety of responses to the understanding of the terms site organization and site quality. The programme required the candidate to explore one Abstract Stance. Needless to say, the results were multifaceted. Arjun’s experiment with Falling Leaves determining ephemeral trails on the site kick started the session. Hemali‘s understanding of tree trunks and Pournima’s identification of silhouettes were astounding in the interpretation of the arboreal layer and the textural quality it brought to the site. Sonal’s response to the site as a memory was unanimously summed up by all as “simply surreal”, “getting the nerve of the problem” , “potent”, and the fact that she acknowledged that such responses require a “on- site- and- beyond- the- drawing board” attitude to site development. What Sonal chose to highlight in the site layers were the imprints of the temporary events (birds), the regular events (the Nilgai passing through the site) and the once-in-a-while event (the flood) and the way these would reveal themselves to a visitor who has come after the events have occurred. There was an almost plastic (in a good sense) quality to the site in her work.

In other works there were ecological/ environmental responses to the site as well, but to me they seemed to be consumed by the magnitude of their own undertaking of trying to rehabilitate/ engineer the site to respond to the diverse actors involved with it (the flooding river, the nilgai, the birds, land subsidence, partying, client etc.).Like a fellow Jury member put it- these methods struggled to humanize the site for the occupant and did not really probe into their Abstract Stance.

Nishita's drawings kept all of us riveted perhaps because of the right balance of Photoshop and hand drawings- again alluding to that elusive and difficult “Middle Path”. Also striking was her use of the drawing as a mnemonic rather than a straightforward representation, with her notes adding that annotative-narrative element to her work. Her strategy also stemmed from the fact that she chose to allow her site to develop by itself, by limiting her role as a designer by identifying cues in the site which hopefully nature would act upon and express. It was worth photographing for personal consumption.

Thesis again was diverse, but somehow the methodology seemed nearly identical and the end results (strategies) were lean on resolution. There were 4-5 notable exceptions to this observation.

Wherever significant intervention over a period of time is required to preserve or enhance the character of the land, the notion and representation of “the Emerging landscape” becomes a necessity. Otherwise all plans remain two dimensional and Landscape studies at the Urban and Regional scale begin to resemble Planning Strategies rather than Landscape Planning Strategies. The realization that landscapes are three-dimensional spatial entities which take time to emerge is a point that demands expression - especially to make thesis strategies more convincing and resolute .

Personally I enjoyed Kanak's site and Sonal's work on Jabalpur. Sonal almost pulled off a McHarg methodology with stunning drawings, but faltered for the very thing that McHarg-ian methods seldom account for in the end-- the tactile landscape and the people.

The most striking work to me was not the one which had everyone congratulating the candidate, but the study where a particular candidate had “missed the woods for the trees”- in an exercise where the magic lay not just in the restoration of the quarried landscape by re-vegetating it, but in also initiating a new hydrological mesh which would influence settlement growth and land utilization for the years to come- in a place where Quarrying was the most profitable interaction with land. Here too, the visualization of the emerging landscape was fleetingly addressed.

It appears- augmented by observations elsewhere- that sadly, Landscape Perception does not merit analysis and recognition for many since many feel it is very subjective. So What?? It can still inform prioritizing and phasing regional landscape development and planning.

Bombay (Mumbai) was the choice of study for three candidates. One of them actually suggested an alternate development structure to the expanding city- a counterpoint to the very existence of Navi Mumbai. The “Urban planning” layers were not highlighted since it was not an Urban Planning thesis but a determined exercise to identify a better site/ region where Navi Mumbai could have come up- saving the flamingoes, Karanja, Elephanta, Thane Creek etc from dredging and oil spills.

The First Year's work of understanding the City was a mammoth undertaking. The twist to the tale lay in imagining the city devoid of its landscape elements and open spaces, and designing frameworks for these resultant voids such that they could evolve into a part of the urban fabric. There were dissatisfactions voiced (in the course of the programme) that the end solutions were too simplistic. As was rightly pointed out by a faculty member- there was no hardlining on the choice of responses. It was the candidates' decision to choose being sympathetic or not to the contexts. Many chose to just work on de-cluttering the situation to lend coherence rather than making design statements, in the bargain, showcasing that they have learned that all landscape architecture inputs need not be pre-designed/ grand/ static/time bound.Agree with that stance completely.

But it would have been nice to see atleast one bold gesture... would have opened up so many points to debate and learn from.

All in all, it was rejuvenating. There were many lateral thinkers and diverse thoughts about cities we live in and about land and its systems.

Welcome aboard O New batch of Landscape Architects!!