Integrating Change and Uncertainty into Landschape Architecture Projects

Katarina Bajc

Abstract: In the words of Charles Darwin: “It is not the strongest who will survive but those who can best manage change. Contemporary landscape architects today seem to act in that spirit, with a desire to find effective ways of making our environment more adaptable to accommodate open-ended processes. Designing flexible systems is becoming an ideal in landscape architecture. It is recognised that suppressing these characteristics in the past had led to the environmental crisis we are experiencing today and assumed that working against natural principles might also be more costly in terms of maintenance and management. Integrating them into new interventions might support the health of environment and our own. Characteristics of natural systems are getting a crucial role in contemporary design of open space.
The intervention into system and form is a decision of the designer and therefore a flexible design does not offer complete freedom of nature or a triumph of total spontaneity over a man-induced form. The means by which strategies for constructing spatially and temporally open systems can be carried out will be researched in the dissertation. The goal is to determine what kind of design tactics allow experts to integrate unpredictable change but still offer a spatial order and clear structural frame that can accommodate different uses. How to foresee the formal characteristics and spatial structures that will serve as anchoring points, offer orientation and hold durable image over time? Already existing Landscape Architecture projects that claim to be responsive to future unknown changes are examples on which to study how they cope with the fact that they cannot promise clear outcome, and which benefits can they ensure in comparison to more determinate projects.