Agency Residency
David Buckley Borden began his “Special Agent Artist Residency” at Agency Landscape and Planning in January of 2020. What started as an opportunity to fabricate a public engagement model for the Cambridge-MA based firm organically developed into an unprecedented artist-in-residency for both Borden and Agency. Similar to Borden’s previous residencies, the collaborative opportunity was framed as an open-ended program in which the artist would work with an allied community interested in the visual communication of landscape, culture, and ecology. Borden’s intention was to collaborate with in-house designers, planners, and landscape architects within the context of Agency’s professional practice. Unlike Borden’s previous residencies, the opportunity started in step with a global pandemic.
Although Borden’s collaborative aim was to contribute to Agency’s practice in the form of proposals, drawings, models/sculptures, and potential community-driven art installations, COVID19 would present unanticipated constraints. Despite a pivot to a “remote residency” format, both Borden and Agency would benefit from the exchange of creative energy and ideas. Generous mindsets, flexible attitudes, and a host of digital design applications enabled the collaborative experiment to continue. The online output included a series of renderings including landscape perspectives, plans, diagrams, bird’s eye views, and other digital drawings. Some drawings were conventional. While others played with visual communication standards within the field of landscape architecture, albeit through Borden’s unique creative lens.
In terms of career development, the Special Agent Residency was a chance for Borden to re-acclimate himself with the landscape architecture profession in preparation for a two-year appointment as a visiting professor at University of Oregon’s College of Design. Although initially trained as a landscape architect, Borden was grateful to test his creative skills and perspective within the kindred practice of Agency. Specifically, the residency was an opportunity for Borden to apply interdisciplinary expertise he developed at the Harvard Forest. Borden re-tooled his approach to developing environmental science-communication projects with Harvard researchers back to the landscape architecture profession. The success of the residency was certainly built off shared values and a mutual respect. Still, the success was arguably amplified by Agency’s openness to an offbeat creative voice within its rigorous mission-driven practice.
As part of his critical practice, Borden has begun to examine his Special Agent Residency experience as a case-study for embedding visual artists within landscape architecture and planning firms as a forward-thinking mode of interdisciplinary design practice. Borden’s online writings and social media posts are the first steps in his reflection of working with Agency and their shared experience of making environmental place-based issues accessible by means of an art-driven visual narrative.
Site Mapping
Site map with major beloved features and assets, both cultural and environmental. The creative direction for this series of proposal drawings embraces the site’s land-use and local history; natural, cultural, and shared.
Practice Diagram
Local geologic stratum serves as the visual framework to communicate team’s empathetic approach to the master planning and the implementation process.
Annotated Drawing, Redux
Artifacts found on site are recast as potential site futures with the addition of simple annotation. Traditional annotated drawings, a staple of landscape architecture and planning practices, are playfully upended to communicate design intentions, including inspiring visions for the future based on local land-use history.
Organizational Chart, Revived
This John Audubon inspired representation poetically presents the team organizational chart as an ecosystem diagram. Local flora and fauna graphics speak to the team’s dedication to landscape stewardship and its environmentally-sensitive ethos. The non-hierarchical organization is a nod to the fact that the collaborative structure is dynamic, responsive, and inter-dependent. However, the team’s function is firmly centered on needs of local communities.
Conceptual Sustainability Diagram
This inspired reinterpretation of a wind rose diagram casts the landscape’s land-use practices in terms of sustainability from the past into the near future. The diagrams communicate an understanding of sustainable practices in a simple four quadrant wind rose format. Iconic Hudson River images serve as the graphic texture to the diagrams and nod to the site’s rich history.
Diagram as Visual Metaphor
Historic photographs of on-site brick making are presented as a visual metaphor that liken brick-making to the team’s planning process, which is driven by a generative feedback loop between culture and ecology.
Generative Power of Collaboration
As with many creative collaborations, the exchange of novel ideas, applications, and critiques influences all active participants. Creative influence tends to flow both ways when it comes to generative feedback loops. This tendency is often strengthened within the context of an interdisciplinary team. There are clear examples of Borden’s direct influence on Agency project work. The effect of Agency, as a design culture and group of individual designers, also influenced Borden. For example, Borden’s diagrams on collaboration and experimentation, developed for an independent publication on interdisciplinary science-communication clearly builds off graphic tropes he was exposed to while in residence at Agency Landscape and Planning.
Creative Leverage
The Agency AIR presented Borden with opportunities to leverage pre-existing work from his back catalogue of landscape-related artwork. For example, to round out a creative direction for an RFP, Borden combined select “Environmental Flag” graphics with site photographs to produce a series of stylized page dividers for the final submission over the course of an afternoon. These drawings are a simple case of leveraging an artist’s creative capital to add value to a new collaborative effort. It represents a practical win-win opportunity for both visual artist and the landscape architecture and planning studio.