Between nature and artifice : The Landscape Architecture Research Office (1966-1979)

Cambridge in the 1960s was a locus of experimentation and research in new computing technologies -from the production of transportation models for New England to the design of war games simulating the vagaries of the terrain in Vietnam. One research group, working in the nascent field of computer cartography, was formed in the Department of Landscape Architecture at Harvard University. The Landscape Architecture Research Office (1966-1979) represented a radical departure from existing practices within the discipline. At this time, NASA was making its first moves towards erecting image infrastructures in space-able to beam back streams of pictures describing the earth in seemingly infinite detail. The instrumental extension of man into outer space served to remake an imagination of landscape; and the research office, banking on the promise held out by satellites and computers, was preparing a technological ground to receive this new vision. This thesis will examine two of their early projects, the first a study that utilizes a computer mapping program (GRID), to draw multiple disciplinary objectives, from physical geography to governance to aesthetics, into the same syntactical register-using the map as a technological armature to craft a new theory of landscape. The second project was an experimental studio run by two of LARO's researchers, Carl Steinitz and Peter Rogers, in which they attempt to simulate the function of an imagined computer system able to model all the interconnected processes of urbanization.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Architecture.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2009

Author dc:creator

• McMahon, Catherine F. (Catherine Fae)

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Arindam Dutta.

• Architecture.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/49726

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/49726