Progress Report 2

The project has changed in two major ways: the timeline has shifted, and I will now be making a trip to New York in late July to see Central Park, the Highline, and many other places.

Now, instead of focusing on research and data gathering until late Fall, I will do a four week mini-project, touching on all the steps I had planned for the entire project. At the end of the four weeks I will present my work to a faculty jury on July 21st. Then, I get to repeat the whole project over the next academic year with the wisdom gained from the first round. At Nicholas's request, I've made an assignment sheet for this four week project, downloadable here. This assignment sheet details what I will be producing over the next four weeks, and offers an even more concise project description than the one I posted before.

I now get to go to New York! I plan to go for one week, from July 28th through August 4th. I was allowed (barely) by the Haas Scholars Program to add this trip to my research budget. Two major precedents for this project are in New York: Central Park, by Frederick Law Olmsted, and the Highline, by Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

I have been collecting images that are relevant to the project, and they should be embedded in this slide show. Click on the little speech bubble to see the captions.

I will add to this set of images continually, as well as select five of the most compelling ones to describe this project. Some of them are precedents, while others illustrate relationships between design, nature, and urbanity. I have added citations as captions to the images; more detailed notes on each one will be posted soon. As soon as my camera arrives, I will be making a trip to San Francisco to capture some of my own images for this project.

Software training has been delayed further--I need to make some urgent repairs to my laptop before I can reinstall windows or any other software.

After moving into the studio space in Wurster Hall, I now have other people to talk to, and who recommend books to me, including Eleanor, who recommended portions of: Recovering Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture, James Corner, Ed.; Common Landscape of America, 1580 t0 1845, by John R. Stilgoe; Landscape in Sight: Looking at America, by J. B. Jackson; A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time, also by J. B. Jackson.

I am focusing on a smaller set of questions from the outline and brainstorm I posted last week. Here is an image, with the new questions highlighted in pink.