ABSTRACT
This chapter provides historical background regarding environmental design theory. The roles of form and function in driving design ideas and design interventions are examined. The discourse highlights landscapes as intricate, composed of varied systems – interactive, receptive, and reciprocal. The chapter helps to students to generate and draw experimental forms informed by the natural and cultural processes that are active on most sites and to generate and assess the appropriateness of unique and experimentally revealed forms, identifying design interventions that are synergetic, interceding carefully amid complex and sensitive processes. The landscape architectural profession is benevolent. It is committed to fitting human needs to the land in ways that sustain and support natural systems, free to perform their life-giving role, both functionally and aesthetically. The chapter concludes with form-finding exercises. The drawing experiments acknowledge dynamic attributes at work on a site. Experimental drawing is one avenue for producing form ideas that may contribute to a successful design intercession.
