OASE 107

>This issue of OASE traces the role of drawing in landscape design and urbanism. It addresses ‘new traditions’ of the last 50 years, as well as recent concerns with ecological, metabolic and process-oriented questions.

In recent decades, the drawing practices in landscape design and urbanism have seen a number of transformations. Current developments in theory and practice have rendered the distinction between the two more diffuse. Both disciplines are no longer regarded as architecture – or gardening – ‘on a larger scale’, primarily anchored in questions of housing, land development or embellishment. Today ecology, energy transition or ‘metabolic’ issues are much more present, which leads to new forms of drawing. Leaving an object-oriented thinking behind, both disciplines seem to be convinced of the importance of the process and the impact of the factor of time. Space has become understood as an intersection – a ‘coagulation’ – of a multiplicity of flows and processes.

For designers it is an essential question how all these flows and processes come together, materialize, and become visible, and how their ‘spatialization’ in drawings is represented in analysis and design. The design and the drawing seem to be torn between a process-oriented agenda and a spatial intervention whose success depends on disciplinary expectations of care, materiality and intrinsic aesthetic qualities. Sustainable design not only presupposes a bold solution to the problem, but must also be beautiful, empathic and affective. What role does the drawing play – from cartography to sketch? Which traditions offer starting points? What innovations are needed?