More Storytelling, Less Precision
In our first lecture of the year, Prof. Hill showed us a series of satellite photos that were zoomed in and cropped such that the landscapes appeared as textural patterns disconnected from their surrounding context. While these images are beautiful and mesmerizing in their complexity, they don’t communicate much about the underlying structure and processes of the landscape to one who is not already familiar with them. By zooming in so far, they prioritize beauty and detail but fail to tell a story.
For our first project of the semester, we were asked to tell a story with our drawings. Most of the time in landscape architecture, the goal of a drawing is to communicate a design accurately. We rely on CAD software to draw precise lines over surveys and base maps, and photoshop to provide realistic imagery and textures. In this digital workflow we can copy, paste, filter, and edit endlessly, and add layer upon layer of contextual information. With these tools at our fingertips, it can be easy to overdo it. High definition base maps, richly detailed survey data and libraries of photos and textures are tantalizing in that they fill up the page and please the eye with their complexity- but similar to the zoomed in satellite images, their complexity can come at the cost of creating a clear narrative. Worse still, they can distract from the main message- as Prof. Ruggeri noted, “sometimes when people look at an unedited map, they see the things you don’t want them to see.”
One lesson learned from this first project is that the decision of what to edit out can be more important than the decision of what to include. Texture and complexity, while undeniably beautiful, shouldn’t necessarily be goals unto themselves. Sometimes we want energy and noise, sometimes we want clarity. Sometimes we need to be accurate, and sometimes- or perhaps most of the time- people want to hear a story that they will remember.