Category: A 50-year Journey to Discover a Fun, Comfortable Way to Learn Landscape Architectural Design

The book Landscape Architecture as Storytelling goes into more detail on design approach ideas and realizations than provided in these 38 installments: understanding design features, spaces, and sequences of spaces as the expression of messages, determining your design’s users’ reasons for and expectations when visiting your design, and the history and value of storyboarding, and…

Our exploration of Landscape as Storytelling brings us to a number of conclusions. First and foremost is that “People Come First.” Well, Simonds would likely say “people’s experiences come first.” Following that thinking here, once you’ve developed a written narrative, turned it into a storyboard reflecting the narrative’s content, flow, and continuity, you can then…

I once had the opportunity to design the backyard of a condominium built into a slope. What with the downward slope from front to back of the condo, visitors would be greeted at the front door, then go downstairs to sliding glass doors and out to the rear yard. As an alternative, visitors might walk…

Some of you may have already questioned and played with just the how a landscape narrative unfolds. When I say “landscape narrative unfolds” I refer to the sequence of  messages as one moves through a series of landscape spaces. Just to be sure, here are a number of considerations: how a landscape narrative is read…

A final note, regarding things to be aware of when making a combined narrative-storyboard presentation as a means of expressing your design. Such presentations are extremely powerful. Unlike many design presentations comprised of design jargon and the language of geometry, your written narrative is a presentation of design participants’ experiences. As such, your client readily…

In their presentations, designers, especially as students, often say things like “I wanted,” “I liked,” “I decided,” “I picked this and put it here.” As a result, they are questioned about “their” selections, “their” decisions, and “their” placement of things. As a result, it is very easy for them to take a client’s or teacher’s…

Once you have what feels like a smoothly flowing written narrative, it is time to transform it into a storyboard. A few important thoughts. Storyboarding is an organized collection of individual sketches (or moments) experienced by your character(s) typically along a walk or pathway. Use 5”x7” cards. One sketch per card or page or frame…

Throughout my teaching career I believed that if you can’t express it, you can’t see it and vice versa. Getting to where you can see, and as Rae would argue, smell, touch, hear, and taste what you want to say, and clearly say what you want others to experience is helped by Betty Edwards (1999),…

Although referring to the structure of a poem, consider the following in regard to the development of a landscape design. “The formal analysis of a poem is [for the reader] largely a demonstration of probability through all the parts. Or better, in the [poem’s] beginning anything is possible; in the middle things become probable; in…