Drawing time in landscape architecture: abstraction as a drawing strategy to link temporal to spatial information

Abstract

Time is present in landscape architecture as perhaps in no other design discipline. However, in the field of landscape graphic expression there is not a solid theoretical response to this specific need to work the temporal variables of the project with drawing. On the contrary, professional practice is dominated by spatial representations, inherited from architecture. This article proposes a classification system of graphic strategies to represent the landscape projects temporal information. The notion of graphic abstraction is proposed to assess the extent to which the drawing resorts to temporal or spatial graphic elements to encode time-related information. By systematically comparing drawings of existing landscape works, three possible graphic strategies are distinguished: immaterial, geometric, and figurative temporality. This research seeks to contribute to a more complete understanding of how the way time is drawn influences the design process and opens a line of research that in professional practice may help to optimize the graphic resources needed for each phase of the project.