Research + Publications
Codify Project
Codify: Parametric and Computational Design in Landscape Architecture provides a series of essays that explore what it means to use, modify and create computational tools in a contemporary design environment. Landscape architecture has a long history of innovation in the areas of computation and media, particularly in how the discipline represents, analyses, and constructs complex systems. This curated volume spans academic and professional projects to form a snapshot of digital practices that aim to show how computation is a tool that goes beyond methods of representation and media. The book is organized in four sections; syntax, perception, employ, and prospective. The essays are written by leading academics and professionals and the sections examine the role of computational tools in landscape architecture through case studies, historical accounts, theoretical arguments, and nascent propositions.
Reviews
‘Codify is the long-awaited book for landscape architects bridging professional practice with data driven design. Filled with case studies that include scripting and digital analysis, to the implementation of smart algorithms, and custom applications, all leading to new methods of organizing, understanding and quantifying data that allow for smarter, sustainable landscape architecture. This book represents the future of a profession that will be dominated by high quality, automated, readily available remote sensing information and provides direction for how landscapes will be designed, built and managed in the future by both humans and smart applications.’
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Daniel Tal, Landscape Architect, USA
‘Do electronic trees dream of photosynthesis? Artificial intelligence, robots, virtual reality, video games, coding, big data, cybernetic design… This volume is destined to become the bible for landscape architects and environmental designers looking for inspiration on how to integrate technology in every aspect of design from coding and programming to construction administration and post-occupancy evaluation. Within these pages, educators, practitioners, and futurists examine the exciting application and potential for computation to shape the built environment and the direction of landscape architectural education.’
Chip Sullivan, ASLA, Professor, UC Berkeley, USA
Publications
EcoCircuit, a Text2Flow Application: Deciphering Environmental Metabolism Through Staging and Collaborating with Language Models
As featured in the 9-2024 issue of the Journal of Digital Landscape Architecture
Abstract: Landscape architecture, a discipline that crafts a creative and integrated vision of a site while navigating underlying complexities of the environment, is rapidly evolving with the surge of AI tools and large language models (LLMs). This leads to a pertinent question: Can AI grasp the nuanced intricacies in portions of landscape architecture or entire design concepts to enhance environmental comprehension and invigorate the creative process? In this instance, we focus on the metabolic understandings of site, systems, and large sale city planning around ‘urban metabolism’, and if AI can assist in innovating at the systems performance cycles level of a project, and in the graphics which illustrate those processes. Building upon designers’ existing practices in platforms like Midjourney and ChatGPT to generate ideas in text and images through prompts, this research developed a new tool to decode environment metabolism: EcoCircuit. EcoCircuit, empowered by LLMs, features a Text2Flow workflow that allows users to input an environmental description and generate complex landscape flow visuals. These visuals, intricately representing landscape metabolisms, leverage visual problem-solving with the Chain-of-Thoughts LLM reasoning framework of staging prompts.
Keywords: Artificial intelligence, language models (LMs), metabolism, generative flow diagrams
From Curves to Aggregation: A Computational Toolset from a Broader Thesis on Geotechnical Urbanism
As featured in the 7-2022 issue of the Journal of Digital Landscape Architecture
Abstract: Within the architectural engineering and construction industry (AEC), we have developed diagrammatic representations and software translations of cultural patterns, extruded 2D cities, and
built architecture of processed materials palettes (DEAMER & BERNSTEIN 2010). However, we are not yet able to diagrammatically compute the translation (intent to manifestation) of wild contexts and materials systems. This paper demonstrates a hybrid software approach to the bulk manipulations of aggregate, somewhere between that of a wild randomization and a refined aesthetic, at two scales: a residential garden and a regional waterfront. Developing new software for aggregating “wild” (i. e. rock, soils and organic matter) rather than “cultured” (cast-in-place concrete, steel beams, and pre-fabricated urbanism) will result in new opportunities in the ecological landscape definition of the terms, and provide tooling for new forms of urban aggregate across more dynamic and less predictable cultural conditions – so-called geo-technical urbanism(s). This experimentation is applied conceptually to computationally replicate the manual processes which created a renowned residential garden; the experimentation also demonstrates its broader scalability in the contexts of sea-level rise and coastal urbanism.
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Thesis question + use cases: How might new geotechnical approaches to computing aggregate + aggregations of other “wild” materials impact urban + landscape design systems?
Keywords: Wild, aggregate, aggregation, geotechnical urbanism
Three Cases of Re-configuring Scope, Agency, and Innovation for Landscape Architecture
As featured in the 5-2020 issue of the Journal of Digital Landscape Architecture
Abstract: Landscape architecture is not a profession huge in numbers with deep financial pockets...Yet, we’ve made enormous contributions, many unsung, and have much more to offer. We need to find ways to innovate – ways to grow. Landscape architecture’s nascent forays in computational ecologies, construction innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurial skills for our private real estate and development clients, can help fund the profession’s own research and development in the agency of our practices. Three technological practice tracks in landscape architecture have emerged. In this paper, we present implemented cases for each:
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In-House / Firm-based superusers
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External technology consultants
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Most recently landscape architecture technology start-ups and development ventures
Having practiced in each of these settings, and through implemented project cases, the authors will demonstrate how landscape architects can leverage imaginative digital technology, and informative data tracks in contemporary practice, for the entrepreneurial purposes of the landscape architect.
Keywords: Construction, landscape practice, 3D scanning, parametric, software
Middlebrook Farm:
a landscape story
Middlebrook is Iowa's first Agrihood. Agrihoods enable development to preserve land for farming where people live, allow for investment in critical farm infrastructure and subsidize a portion of the cost to operate a diversified community farm. Middlebrook represents a community of neighborhoods, where families can be raised, memories created, and dreams achieved; its Middlebrook, in sustainable harmony.