Led by founders Karen M’Closkey and Keith VanDerSys, Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Landscape Architecture, respectively, Philadelphia-based PEG office of landscape + architecture has earned an international reputation for its pioneering work in the use of digital tools and dynamic patterns. Now their work is the subject of a new exhibition on view at the University of Melbourne, where M'Closkey recently spoke as part of the school's Dean's Lecture Series.
In her lecture, M'Closkey touched on projects ranging from Philadelphia's Lafayette Park to Taichung Gateway Park in Taichung, Taiwan, with technology serving as the bridge between science and aesthetics. Like scientists, PEG constantly test their designs and consider their work a continuing experiment. But in describing the firm's use of digital models to simulate behaviors in landscapes, M'Closkey noted, “Simulations don't determine form; they inform how you can intervene.”
The aptly titled exhibition, Dynamic Patterns, includes a range of projects and techniques that enable a multivalent, multilayered understanding of pattern as both a form of expression and a shaping element in environmental processes. The projects presented range from small-scale fabrications that explore the capacity of geometry to articulate site functions, such as water collection, to computational modeling and hydrodynamic simulations. Regardless of scale or site, the exhibited work utilizes digital media as a means of both pattern-finding and pattern-forming, heightening perceptions of the temporal and ephemeral phenomena that are characteristic of landscapes.
M'Closkey and VanDerSys are authors of Dynamic Patterns: Visualizing Landscapes in a Digital Age (Routledge, 2016). As guest editors of the upcoming issue of LA+ SIMULATION, the interdisciplinary journal of landscape architecture published by PennDesign, they reflect on how recent technologies have influenced not only how we design with nature but the design of nature itself in entirely unprecedented ways.
Dynamic Patternsis on view at the Andrew Lee King Fun Gallery at the University of Melbourne through September 8.
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