Landscape Design through Maintenance: Field Case Studies in Parametric Mowing

Abstract

Landscape architects respond mainly to changes in their designed landscapes in the first two years after final installation, also known as the “maintenance phase” of the construction contract. The seemingly banal realm of maintenance presents an important and underused opportunity for landscape architects to respond to emerging novelty in their designed landscapes. To understand the generative capacity of maintenance as a design instrument, this article introduces an approach to maintenance before presenting a series of field explorations that use maintenance design as a method for investigating the creation of new landscape. These explorations use mowing—the most apparent form of maintenance—to investigate how maintenance operations mediate the design of landscape. The article offers four principles of maintenance design to synthesize the findings of this inquiry. Despite the connotation of maintenance being solely focused on control and preservation, this article proposes approaching maintenance as a form of care. When a landscape is maintained successfully, the associated maintenance operations are far more diagnostic, parametric, and adaptive than what is suggested by a focus on their pragmatic emphasis on efficiency. Furthermore, maintenance design allows landscape architects to engage the medium in a fundamentally different way by exploring how design and implementation of a maintenance program moderates realization of initial design intent.