Ground Scan

This investigation asks you to pay close attention to something often taken for granted.

Nearly every inch of the urban landscape is a highly controlled, designed surface.  The transitions between materials, activities, zones of circulation are moments where invisible subterranean assemblies meet.

Instructions

Step 1:
Plot a route through the landscape and locate points on reference map where documentation was made.  Scan the surface - using and aerial photograph, an architectural plan, or your own orthographic photo-documentation and drawings of surface expression, materiality, transitions and activities observed.

Step 2:
Produce a drawing to synthesize the data collected as a reference plan for the site that connects the attributes of ground construction to the activities those materials support.

Then, make a survey of thickness by drawing a few cross-sections sections through typical transitions.  Note the location of sections on the reference map.  Imagine what is beneath the visible surface.  

Step 3:
Above these cross sections list all the programs that these assemblies might support.  

How it might be useful

This investigation will generate, by implication, a map of the connections between site and program, but also produce a reference palette of ‘raw materials’ that can be reorganized, transformed, combined with other interests, adapted, etc.

References

Stan Allen, Notations + Diagrams: Mapping the Unmappable.
Littlewood, Michael, Landscape Detailing Vol 1
Littlewood, Michael, Landscape Detailing Vol 2
Astrid Zimmerman, Constructing Landscape: Materials, Techniques, Structural Components, Birkhauser, 2015, excerpt.

Possible Tools

Hand Drawing
Adobe Illustrator
AutoCAD free student trial
Generative Landscapes

Chicago Parks to Reference:

Use any park in the (list) as a constraint or reference, exhausting the landscape, space by space, object by object,  

Try not to ‘overmine’, or ‘undermine’ the survey,  Objects contain, and may be contained by, other objects. Spaces contain, and may be contained by, spaces.