As the field of landscape architecture evolves to combat the issues of our time—climate change and just futures—how we practice matters. Through design research, experimental methods of design process and ideation, and provocative questioning, TEN x TEN challenges the normative environment of professional practice through process-oriented ways of working, engaging, and seeing landscape. Our agency as landscape architects to address the issues of our time is grounded in part by our ability to challenge the critical foundation of the design process itself and to practice modes of discovery as a generative act.
Processes of exploration that reveal a tension between what we thought we knew (about a place, the context, the politics, the past, the truth) and what might be discovered create potential for innovation and imagination. Exploration for the purpose of discovery offers time and space to create a feedback loop between us and a place; between future potential and the conditions of the site itself. Committing to an unfixed and open-ended process of discovery requires that we choose to practice observing, documenting, and translating as a critical way of seeing. The act of exploring, ground truthing, and observing helps us continue to see landscape as a cultural and dynamic medium; to understand what it does and how it works.
