Landscape Architecture Frontiers

The article discusses the topics of cartography and landscape architecture, with a few ideas about technique, scale, observation, translation, and imagination. The charge is to look closely, think critically, and develop sensibly a drawing toolkit that allows for an expansion of possible readings and spatial outcomes. It asks designers to question the information before them, and to respond with precision and range. The challenges are increasingly complex, and thus, media and methods must be plural and robust. The replies herein build on the Cartographic Grounds project, an exhibit and book that again reimagines the projective potential of cartographic practices that afford greater proximity to the manifestation and manipulation of the ground itself, and promotes the intersection between the disciplines of Landscape Architecture and Cartography towards a grounded practice of representing and imagining multiple terrains for design. The introduction of the observation and representation training in Harvard Graduate School of Design further suggests that observation is fundamental, and for design, representation must extend beyond documenting and understanding the world that exists, towards imagining a more equitable and adaptive future.