Collage + Annotation

I wanted to get back to collage... I had a quote earlier from James Corner...

He mentions collage as a means to develop previously unrealizable connections.  His list of words associated with collage are also associated with nature, ecology, and wilderness...

"indeterminacy, inclusivity, overlay, rupture, simultaneity, stochastic event, instability, association, collusion"

Yves Brunier, the late French landscape architect, deserves mention here for his inventive use of collage and everyday material in constructing imaginative landscapes and gardens. Not only do the images provide luscious and evocative spaces, they leave a lot up to the imagination, trusting the material of landscape itself (the sun, wind, vegetation, soil, rocks, etc) to actualize the potential of his flexible vision.
There is a wildness to the images as well as the potentials they create.

 Also worth looking at are Julie Bargmann's (DIRT Studio)  drawings that rely primarily on annotations to describe landscape space and building process.  The annotations not only describe the process of construction, but also record the process of design.  Building process should be a physical manifestation of the design process. 

 If landscape architects played a larger role in the actual construction of their works, there might be a better understanding the stuff of landscape, not the spectacle of the image.  This is where I appreciate Gilles Clement's description of himself as a gardener not an architect.  For him there is no separation between the act of design and the act of construction, planting, and maintenance. The role of instruction is deeply embedded in landscape architecture, yet rarely discussed in the academic realm.  Most work is done in the conceptual design phase and rarely do students explore the possibilities of what happens to their work beyond the drawing table (I mean computer).  The material of landscape becomes the play of computer software.  What if we utilized the techniques of collage and annotation as a means to document process of design and construction.  What if we were to hand off our conceptual stage work; would written description and colliding images provide a better understanding?  Would poetry, appropriation, melange provide a medium for landscape production?

The work of artists in the 70's ( Yoko Ono, Alan Kaprow, Sol Lewitt, and many more) utilized instruction as a means to hand off work and extend it beyond themselves.  The idea that the process was the work itself, not the product, that the viewer/ participant/visitor and medium itself could create the work.  The stuff of landscape is the process, it is the wild that brings the reality to the design.  As designers of the landscape we should utilize techniques of collage and annotation as a means to engage the agency of the landscape in the production of cultural space.

This post needs further work in connecting collage and annotation, but I am primarily interested in how it provides the landscape with imaginative potential and agency.  The landscape is creative after all.