Dynamic Patterns ─ Visualizing Landscapes in a Digital Age

This book explores the role of new forms of pattern and digital media in the creation and understanding of landscapes. Patterns can express processes, the shaping of the environment, temporal changes and they affect our reading of the landscape. As digital media has advanced, our use of programming and modelling to visualise and create these patterns has developed. Dynamic Patterns is about how these tools have facilitated new ways of seeing and designing and, therefore, new ways of understanding landscapes and our place within them.

The authors explain the importance of pattern with respect to two main paradigms – ecological (process), and informational (processing). Looking beyond just the surface, they delve into a multi-layered examination of the dynamic medium of landscape and explore the new avenues for engagement through digital media. Without being restricted to one form of digital system, a theoretical approach is taken to look at the potential of new media to bind together landscape’s utilitarian and aesthetic functions. With full colour throughout, a hundred maps, diagrams, drawings and photographs visualize the interaction between landscape, pattern and digital media.

Karen M’Closkey and Keith VanDerSys are faculty members in the department of landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania and founding partners of PEG office of landscape + architecture, a design and research practice based in Philadelphia. Their firm has received numerous design awards and been widely published for its work exploring fabrication technologies in landscape architecture and, most recently, advances in environmental modeling and simulation tools. They are guest editors of the Fall 2016 issue of LA+ on the topic of simulation. M’Closkey is author of Unearthed: The Landscapes of Hargreaves Associates (2013), which won the J. B. Jackson Book Prize from The Foundation for Landscape Studies. She is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome and was co-recipient with VanDerSys of a 2013 Pew Fellowship in the Arts.