Performing Drawing in Time

Time is integral to the design and perception of landscape architecture, yet it is often conceived as a series of frozen presents, denying the importance of duration and flux within the discipline. Jeremy Till, an architectural critic and academic, cites time’s uncertainty, its lack of essence, as framing the difficulty of reconciling time within architecture (2009). This, he argues in Architecture Depends, is due to architecture’s preciousness admitting contingency within its processes. Landscape architecture has a different relationship with time which is claimed as inherently core to the discipline. However, its representation and documentation does not always demonstrate this; emphasis is given to producing drawings which show ‘frozen moments’. In landscape practice, time must be central, not peripheral to design thinking and making. Therefore, in students’ learning, time must become central rather than peripheral to their practice. This paper reflects on ongoing collaborative teaching and research practices concerned with temporal engagement with the world. This, in part, is due to a skepticism of the rising importance of the singular photographic image – the ‘hero’ shot – which renders landscape as an inanimate thing, separated from its context within time or demonstrating the effects of time. The process of observation the students undertook alludes to Edmund Husserl’s term of a ‘thickened present’ which refers to a spatial, durational quality, in which past events are retained as traces in the present. The paper critically reflects on the teaching and learning aspirations in light of the student work. It also considers how this course sits within the larger domain of landscape practice’s temporal relationships.