With feet of clay: Exploring processual place for landscape design process

Abstract

Despite the academic discourse exploring processual landscape design, practice is often still focussed on landscape architecture as a product. My thesis seeks to explore how practice can be core to designing landscape, and how it can engage meaningfully with local communities. Aspects of self and place are delved into using co-design strategies, to challenge the kind of assumptions that might be made in a more systematic, product-oriented process. It is hoped that by doing so, decisions made in the landscape will engage in a more mobile place, as opposed to a fixed one at the mercy of change processes. Situated in the transformative landscape of rural tourism in New Zealand, Lake Ohau has been identified as a microcosm of issues affecting community resilience. Working with the local community, staff and guests of Lake Ohau Lodge and Snow Fields, a reflexive process has been developed; a combination of participatory based, interdisciplinary methods to collaboratively produce information in designing for possible futures.