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Grant
Jones/Jones – Jones: ILARIS: The Puget Sound Plan,
edited by Jane Amidon.
The latest installment in the Source
Books in Landscape Architecture Series, edited by Knowlton
School of Architecture's Jane Amidon, is a project on a
much larger scale than the Nasher
Sculpture Center Garden or the urban projects of Ken
Smith, previously reviewed here. The Puget Sound Plan
is a regional plan for the aesthetic and natural resources
of a large portion of Washington State and therefore a much
different sort of landscape project than the three previous
books. This helps give the series a broad range that encompasses
the realm of landscape architecture today, ranging from
the detailed garden to waterways, highways, and forests.
The Puget Sound Plan is the work
of Grant Jones of Jones
& Jones, a multi-disciplinary practice located in
Seattle. This book's title gives almost equal weight to
the practitioners and ILARIS
(Intrinsic Landscape Aesthetic Resource Information System),
an award-winning
GIS model "developed to rapidly assess and communicate
the intrinsic characteristic landscape forms that define
a region’s scenic character, assess the scenic value
and cultural heritage of a region, and capture which of
these features are most prized by the public." This
situation illustrates the double-edge sword of the increasing
dependence of architects and planners on technological tools
and the unprecedented visualization that comes out of these
tools. It's a situation that requires not only someone capable
of utilizing the software but someone capable of making
quality judgments from the graphical output; for example,
a developer may use the output for much different ends than
a conservation organization, as pointed out by Amidon. So
while the software may give designer and client a greater
understanding of what they're dealing with, it must be accompanied
by a strong theory (in this case leaning more towards conservation
than development) towards the application of the graphical
data.
The use of GIS, and in this case
ILARIS, once again brings to the fore that need to find
a way to resolve the break between plan graphics and on-the-ground
experience, where GIS must be accompanied by fieldwork,
for example. It's naive to think that one can work without
the other -- as Modernism shows that ignoring the user's
experience can lead to some miserable environments -- though
as tools in one realm and scale consider others, a better-integrated
design approach is less a fantasy and more an obtainable
reality.
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