Acclaimed designs such as Stourhead landscape garden are a valuable source of knowledge for spatial designers. Geographic information systems (GIS) can help us to acquire new design knowledge and further enhance spatial intelligence within landscape architecture, argues Steffen Nijhuis.
In his doctoral research, Nijhuis used GIS to analyse Stourhead landscape garden in the English county of Wiltshire and test it as a tool for landscape design research. The garden was designed as a series of three-dimensional paintings in which eye-level sight lines and walks play an important role as structural principles. Every view has certain angle points, like a Greek temple or statue, that help visitors find their way through the landscapes. “By conducting analysis with geographic information systems, we discovered that the designed scenes follow specific visual patterns or rules. For example, they never create a horizontal angle of more than 30 degrees,” says Nijhuis. “The only possible conclusion is that these landscapes were designed by eye.”
It is one of the startling insights revealed in the GIS analysis of this 18th-century southern English garden landscape. GIS is a platform that spatially combines knowledge of various scientific disciplines with the possibilities offered by technology. By adding information from different systems and fields of science – from topography to environmental psychology – to the digital map, the viewer can walk out of the map and into a 3-D world, as it were. This opens up unprecedented opportunities for exploring the existing environment, as well as designing new ones.
In his doctoral research GIS-based landscape design research. Stourhead landscape garden as a case study, Nijhuis was interested in exploring landscape design as architectural composition. He used GIS as an additional tool to enhance his research. Nijhuis believes it is high time for landscape architects to make greater use of this method, which itself partially stems from the discipline of landscape architecture. Although it is not a panacea, GIS is a tool that opens up an enormous number of possibilities. It results in much richer modelling and a clearer view of compositions in landscape architecture across time and from the perspective of eye level. The power of the computer is able to make links that a human observer is incapable of identifying. “The short-term human memory is only capable of processing 2.5 bit of information at the same time. We cannot focus on more than 5 to 6 variables simultaneously,” explains Nijhuis. “A 64-bit computer, however, registers everything that we unconsciously exclude.”
In addition, GIS visualisations can represent landscape architectural compositions in space and time. Nijhuis used it to penetrate the historic layers of the Stourhead garden in the same way as a restorer uses x-ray technology to analyse a painting by Rembrandt. Modelling, analysis and visualisation techniques revealed spatial relationships and changes in the garden's design that had never been seen before. The wealth of information that this method offers can prove useful in designing, but also in maintaining the existing garden. If an historic tree dies, it is easier to explore the role it played in the designer's composition. In this way, GIS can form an excellent basis for restorations. “GIS broadens the perception of the design researcher by means of measurements, simulations and experiments. It is a way of enhancing the thought process.”