Design in Many Acts: Towards a Landscape-Theatrical Relationship with Site

Over the past 150 years, Mayo Island in Richmond, Virginia, has experienced many ruptures in time, space, and relationship as its topography was commodified, filled, paved, flooded, and sold. Another such rupture is planned for the next few years when the city will remove most of the island’s hardscape to transform it into a park, ignoring how plants, animals, wind, and water are already transforming the site. In response, this thesis proposes a slower approach to Mayo Island’s coming transformation, one that directly confronts the gravity of choosing to change a site. It asks how the public might bear witness not just to a “finished product”, but also to the messy and at times violent process of landscape transformation. It explores how the landscape is, itself, an ongoing performance, and how it might be designed and perceived as such.

Landscape architecture is largely an art of choreographing ongoing relationships. So often, though, these choreographies, even when carefully considered in the field or the studio, become largely imperceptible in the landscape, dependent on interpretive signs to be noticed. Furthermore, landscapes today undergo frequent, rapid, and sweeping transformations from construction and climate change.

In exploring these issues, the thesis turns to theater studies as a theoretical source for landscape architecture. Theater employs form, narrative, time, and ritual to defamiliarize experiences of being in space. How might such practices inform an approach to landscape architecture that allows for new ways of seeing the entangled relationships that define our world?

Applying these concepts to the transformation of Mayo Island leads to a design process that employs gradual, iterative actions of deconstructing and directing the landscape. By imbuing these acts with ritual and spectacle, landscape transformation becomes a site of public discourse and empathy-building. Furthermore, by transforming landscapes in many acts, a relationship with site that centers process, slow unfolding, and attentiveness to change can emerge. In a time of rapid transformation of sites, due largely to human actions, such awareness could help to carve a new public dialogue, a new process and politics, of what it means for landscape architects to change the world.