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Reflecting Time in Computer-aided Landscape Design and Analysis: Developing an Application for Modelling Seasonality and Resiliency in Small Scale Landscapes

Time is a vital factor to any landscape design. Landscape design solutions “rely on transformation, growth, decay, flow, and settlement to produce evolving solutions” (Walliss et al. 2014). Although there have been advances in large-scale scenario modelling and analysis, the evolving nature of landscapes are hardly reflected in the way landscape architecture uses CAD in small-scale designs. The timely attention of the discipline to urban resiliency accentuates the importance of acknowledging dynamics of landscape systems in design process. Plants, as living matter of designed landscapes, change through time and are affected by seasons and extreme environmental conditions. Although there are local nuances to the parameters that can affect a planting scheme through time, many aspects of it can be parameterized. In this regard, I developed an application in Processing programming language that addresses the influence of time-related factors such as seasonality and environmental changes on planting design. Accessible large databases such as USDA plant database and the literature in ecological rules for urban planting resiliency (Hunter 2011) are incorporated into this rule-based CAD tool for designing resilient landscapes. This paper provides a brief review of landscape resilience and the current use of CAD in small-scale landscape design. In addition, it explains the underlying rule-based ecological theory in the process of the application development. Lastly, it demonstrates the application developed as an example of this parametric approach to landscape design. The interactive app shows the resiliency of a planting scheme under different extreme environmental scenarios, bloom resiliency, and the colour palette of the planting scheme throughout a year. This parametric tool has both design and educational purposes and is applicable in design analysis, facilitating user-engagement, and long-term maintenance and monitoring of small-scale landscapes.

Autor / Author: Tebyanian; Nastaran
Institution / Institution: Penn State University, Pennsylvania, USA
Seitenzahl / Pages: 8
Sprache / Language: Englisch
Veröffentlichung / Publication: JoDLA − Journal of Digital Landscape Architecture, 1-2016
Tagung / Conference: Digital Landscape Architecture 2016 – Representing, Evaluating and Designing Landscapes: Digital Approaches
Veranstaltungsort, -datum / Venue, Date: Istanbul, Turkey 01-06-16 - 03-06-16
Schlüsselwörter (de):
Keywords (en): Time, data visualization, processing, resilience, urban landscape, landscape apps
Paper review type: Full Paper Review
DOI: doi:10.14627/537612025
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