On Friday, May 24, 2002, at 09:10 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > One method for doing this was evolved by Gian Carlo di Carlo, a > renowned italian architect/urban designer who created a concept called > 'reading' the landscape - this was done through immersing yourself > physically within the place, learning the > history,folklore,social/economic background, sketching, photograping, > walking the ground and generally keeping oneself open to every > impression from every direction in order that all impressions - > subconscious or otherwise - will feed into ones understanding: when > then ateeempting any kind of built or otherwise intervention in the > landscape, all these ideas will feed back in. >
A lot of this sounds very similar to what ethnographers do - hang out, get the feel for a place etc. What's intriguing is what's left out - people and human activity. Does the method incorporate observing/talking to/interacting with people in the place other than via background research? There's a lot of interesting stuff around about mapping space/place from a human activity perspective - eg space syntax analysis (http://www.spacesyntaxlaboratory.org/ - these are the people that did the study of the Tate and discovered that visitors hugely favoured the left hand side of the building not because that's where the stuff they were most interested in was but because the layout of the building 'drove' them there - kind of sobering thought for artists, it's not what you do it's where you hang as it were). /catriona PS a lot of the images these analyses generate are really beautiful and incredibly touching - the tracks of all those people, why were they there, what were they thinking, where are they now...There's a net.art project in there somewhere tracking people's movement through a space and generating a website on the fly from it... ------------------------------------------------- a m b i t : networking media arts in scotland post: [EMAIL PROTECTED] info: send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and write "info ambit" in the message body -------------------------------------------------
