Irradiated Landscapes: Journey to Prospect Cottage

Abstract

How does one map a memory of a place, a fragment of time, in a way that is as evocative and vivid as the initial experience? When we prospect a landscape, we witness it as it is now; light and shadow define it, complete with its current solar exposure, humidity and temperature. As we then move through the landscape our brains process this information, leading us to perceive something entirely new. Our memory of that perception is also rewritten each time we recall it. Intended as a process of design research – based at the late Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage on Dungeness beach in Kent, UK – this essay attempts to capture the fluidity of these perceived experiences and freeze them into sited mappings, unique to the temporal and climatic experience of the observer. Centered on the production of digitally-crafted ‘perceptual cartographies’, which are designed/generated from the site, it presents an exploration into ways of seeing architecture and landscape. In doing so, the essay calls for the recording of sites and designs in which emotional responses – induced by light – leave traces of the spaces in the individuals who visit them, creating a temporally sensitive and deeply perceptual experience of that place.

Keywords

• design research
• derek jarman
• prospect cottage
• cartography
• photogrammetry
• 3d-scanning
• atmosphere
• immateriality