Landscape Design through Maintenance
The “maintenance phase” of the construction contract offers an important and underutilized opportunity for landscape architects to respond to emerging novelty in their designed landscapes. These explorations use mowing – the most apparent form of maintenance – to investigate how maintenance operations mediate the design of landscape and propose that when a landscape is maintained successfully, the associated operations are far more diagnostic, parametric, and adaptive than their pragmatic focus on efficiency suggests. In utilizing the formal language of machinery, landscape architects are able to engage the medium in a fundamentally different way, through a process-based mediation of landscape change.
Geffel, M., “Landscape Design through Maintenance | field case studies in parametric mowing,” Landscape Journal vol 39, issue 2, University of Wisconsin Press. 2021
Masters of Landscape Architecture | University of Virginia | SARC Foundation Fellow 2010-13
Thesis | Editing Emergence: Towards a Generative Maintenance Practice
Advisors | Teresa Gali-Izard, Brian OsbornThe publication of this thesis as "Landscape Design through Maintenance," was only achieved thanks to the mentorship of Julian Raxworthy, Brian Osborn, Roxi Thoren, Liska Chan, and Mark Eischeid.