1-Work oneself into a state of excitement
During the first hours, without much precision in the program nor on the site that will be the object of your intervention, I invite you to set up two parallel actions of a great intensity: on a territory that is mostly unfamiliar to you, you need to make up in a short period of time, an enormous deficit of knowledge and a thousand question must be asked: what happened, what is going on on this site? What does one want to do to it? And who wants it? What was its apex, its decline, why is it available today and why does it need to be transformed? What are its inclinations and in what order of linked spaces is it inscribed?All these questions and many others that should be answered at a particular moment during the design work, can stay for a while evasive, suspended. It is the questioning itself that will determine and will engage you into the reality, it is that which will galvanize your focus. From the early moments, a certain cognitive emulation must sharpen your vision and your sensitivity. This insatiable need to be informed and the work that is required should not however delay the commitment to the formal work of the design.At the same time, without waiting for all the answers to your questions, you can formulate work hypotheses and draw the first landscape propositions.Intuition is the momentum that should be the genesis of your design. It seems to me, the importance is to take a design attitude as soon as possible in order to avoid the procrastination of a previous preliminary analysis.
2-Traveling in all directions
You have to search the entire site and its surroundings in every sense, observing and registering all configurations, all the things down to the smallest and the most negligible; you do not have to lose anything from this written page. Francois Dagognet in “Epistemologie de l’espace concret » tells us : “Do not leave the ground, the inscription, the habitat, the landscape, there where the living establish themselves, the materials, the data.” “ The landscape is a method, one finds less in it than through it.” It is at the surface or even in the futility (almost) that the truth shines and can be “stopped”. Nowhere else”. “The scientist is too tempted to neglect the traces, the folds, the hatches, the integuments; it is in the secondary, or even in the derisory, that Life is recognized and can be apprehended.” (…)
3-Exploring the limits and surpassing them
Any project on the territory should begin by a reevaluation of the apparent legitimacy of boundaries convenient for one purpose, refusing to let the landscape fragment into multiple “terrains of action”, blind to each other. On the contrary, the design of every place needs to be instructed by a broad knowledge of the site that houses it, its design must work together all the data induced by adjacent spaces which by linking, compose the diverse horizons of a site. You must not be focused on the exclusive ascendancy of one domain. You need to sneak away, take some distance, join the limits in order to discover the different exits by which you can escape. By enlarging your point of view, by surpassing the given limits, you can measure their resistance, the state of their porosity. (…)
4-Leaving to come back (…)
5-Crossing through scales (…)
6-Anticipating (…)
7-Defend open space (…)
9-Keep control of your own design
Opening the time of your own project and making explicit its different steps of elaboration are an appropriate method to share it and enrich it if necessary; but you must be careful not to let the core of the design be invaded, monopolized, and finally deviated by the person you speak with (starting with your teachers!). The creator is the only one able to make sure about the coherence and unity of his work in making forms. Therefore, you should stay the guardian of your own designs.
Michel Courajoud, To the students of the schools of lanscape-architecture (2000)
landscape theory 