Designed Landforms

Abstract

Earth is the raw material and foundation for many designed works of architecture, landscape architecture and urban design. From carefully controlled agricultural landforms (terraced rice paddies, contour plowing) to earth-covered structures and structural earth forms, from pre-historic burial mounds to modern ‘earthworks art’, people have always molded the earth’s surfaces to their needs and fancies. Constrained by geological history and climatic imperatives, but also freed by modern technology and structural techniques, designed earthforms take on a wide range of forms. Landscape architects use landforms to control drainage and circulation, to complement designs of buildings and vegetation, and as expressive material in its own right. Techniques of representation of landforms have evolved in the past century from engraving and hachure as epitomized in early topographic maps, to a wide range of technologically sophisticated formats, including laser-gathered point-clouds, triangulated irregular nets, NURB surfaces and grid meshes, cross sections, solid models and procedural and algorithmic descriptions. Modern digital techniques open up new avenues for describing and building earthforms - but still to serve our needs and fancies.