ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses 3D printing and automated digital fabrication of landscape sites, current limitations and future possibilities. The potential for a certain fidelity and accurate description of landscape conditions through digital fabrication is an emerging avenue for landscape architecture model making. For landscape architecture models the major limiting factor in production is the 'build envelope' of common printers. Three-dimensional printing affords a certain fidelity to landscape if the digital file is correctly modelled and a number of techniques employed. The model has unique qualities in its ability to provide haptic sensations in making, pedagogic lessons in the accounting of errors and an increasing fidelity to landscape form enabled by 3D printing. Landscape modelling can be completed in a variety of modes; it has until recently largely revolved around abstraction of reality, emphasising certain qualities or elements particular to the landscape brief rather than strict accuracies derived from remote-sensing in the natural sciences or earlier techniques of survey.
