Sometimes projects don’t work out...
Have you noticed this too? We look around at the results of competitions and RFPs and it is the same list of names.
We KNOW there were incredible proposals in a pile that never made the shortlist. How do we know this you ask? Because we created some of those proposals – and we know you did too. We also see the coverage of “innovative, transformative, resilient” ideas getting acclaim and reward, and it looks awfully similar to an idea on our friend’s desk 10 years ago - that approach, the client felt, was just too risky to realize.
Yes, ok, sure, that’s just how design works. Nothing is “new” and everything comes back around. Like we can’t believe that crop tops and platform sandals are back, but here we are.
Let's pull that proposal from the archive and look again. What were you trying to do at the time? Is it still a project that gets you excited? Or something that was radical at the time, and has since come around in other avenues.
So we’ve decided this is a job for a zine. A space for ideas that have not been realized or awarded but still have a hold on our imagination. We aim to ask ‘what if?’ and ‘why not?’ by reflecting on the design schemes that didn’t get selected or were otherwise thwarted: the misfits, the losers with soul, the ugly ducklings ahead of their time (Look where the duck got Venturi). Yes, Rem. Yes, Chris, and Jim, etc, some unrealized proposals have captured our collective imagination and continue to shape our field garnering discussions and debates about what IF the elevator was there instead of the follies. That’s cool. But for the rest of us, value and status is assigned in our field by specific pathways: awards from juries and constructed work. We think this process leaves some worthy questions in the dustbin – and we’re asking you to help us fish them out.
Borrowing from methods of exchange from DIY cultures, this zine recognizes the process of image-making as a powerful mode of research production. We are inspired by the Low Carbon Research Methods Group, to explore a zine-circle as a format for exchange that recognizes the need to reduce the social, environmental, and mobility burden of typical conference formats.
Image-making, collage, and adaptation are all processes native to landscape imagination. The design of landscapes is done through a process of sampling. We reference and remix the work of other designers, other places, combined with elements of the specific site and its context. The competition format itself draws on our methods of exploring, testing, and sharing ideas through creative production. Like zine-making, speculative images are created in reference to other existing images, symbols, and cultural ideas. We challenge participants to use this process as a means of reflecting on unrealized work and unearthing latent potentials for other ways of doing design.
Sure, maybe we’re nostalgic for the times before social media, but we contend that there is value in a conversation at the pace of the postal service. Zine-circles were such a conversation of call and response through crafted images and text. Communities were formed around niche subjects through an exchange of zines, and many of us found our own voices and passions through slow processes of making. Zines have been a platform for ideas from the margins to circulate among friends, and catch hold. We all know that our field must change how we build and who is given voice – perhaps the ideas we can’t let go offer a new path forward.