LAN3016Y F
Instructor(s): Victoria Taylor
Meeting Section: L0102
Tuesday, 9:00am - 1:00pm, 2:00pm - 6:00pm; Friday, 2:00pm - 6:00pm
 

photo: Natalie Stone for Walking with Thunder by Conrad Beaubien
Chapter 2 ‘Once Upon A Bridge’ PEC Millennium Trail, Consecon
Presented by ====\\DeRAIL Platform for Art + Architecture
11 November 2020.

 

“.. {the} vast array of pleasures which fall into the category of doing nothing in particular, of woolgathering, cloud-gazing, wandering, window-shopping, are nothing but voids to be filled by something more definite, more production, or faster-paced…I like walking because it is slow, and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought or thoughtfulness.”
-- Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: The History of Walking.
 

Slow Landscape is a studio where we consider how to slow an experience of place to a new pace. Moving at a new speed; slowing down enough to bring landscape into the foreground, students will create and express an unique 1-3 day journey through a place, in a world, that is speeding up.

Slow Landscape is a studio where we explore, notice, research, build, reflect and design a journey and moments of pause along that journey through a place that is typically explored by car, social media, or along the Millennium Trail, a 46km public recreation trail and former rail corridor built for commerce and efficiency. We will define new trails.

Students will use slow movement as a time - and body-focused tool to study a place and design an experience of a place. We will explore where walking is not just the moment but a re-marking of other moments, beings and footsteps that have come before; where slow movement is a process of looking forward, backward, and taking in what’s adjacent. Where time is something to be considered rather than counted, the studio invites students to add their own interpretations of a slow landscape experience beyond the familiar focus of movement from A to B.

The studio considers: How does time play a role in discovery? What methods are effective when we slow down to listen, observe and imagine new possibilities? How might a slowing down lead to negotiating new understandings of a place, as well as being the meaning and purpose in itself as we move in a new time through changing landscapes. How can we use our role as land-based designers to advocate for decolonized environmental protection, to build a new awareness for cultural and natural heritage and a respect for the footsteps of those who walked before us?

In a place known as Prince Edward County, an almost island located a few hours east of Toronto, we slow down to the pace of landscape. Through time-based movement, visualizations, decisions of scale and materials we will lean into the speed of other living beings, geologic processes and past histories to think about what we can do as landscape architects to create new experiences of place for both locals and visitors. We will tap into the hunger of tourism to re balance and re position landscape as protagonist, to consider nature as vital, and inspire the civic duty to keep our world in balance. In a place moving at full speed, we will slow things down.

In a place suffering from the success of its own marketing, how can we influence and reset tourism away from being an extractive, depletive industry into one that supports and nourishes local natural systems and habitats; where landscape is not just a backdrop for instagram, but instead the vital systems on which all life relies, where people open their eyes to the interconnectedness of all living beings - land, water, the studio will reveal vulnerabilities, help to set limits, re define what is precious, and build new relationships to a new expression of place.