Edge Effect

During my semester in Barcelona, the only other Clemson grad student (a landscape grad) and I asked to work together on our semester project. This wasn’t taken well at first - the professors wanted graduate students to have their own projects since it would essentially be double the work of the undergrads. But we soon convinced them with an argument about collaboration or something. Really, we were just hoping we could keep each other motivated to work on studio amidst the distractions of Barcelona.

What happened was more than I could ask for. By the end, we were both deeply involved in the “other” discipline. It was hardly landscape vs building - that delineation was long gone. We had taken over our entire site and even proposed further expansion within a 9-block radius.

The night before the final review, we finished all our work around 11pm and still had a blank space for the name of the project. So we called in a few friends, handed them a glass of wine and began to explain our work in hopes of some last-minute inspiration. We settled on an ecological concept that we’d been using to describe our project for a while: the Edge Effect. It described the greater diversity of life found in the region where two adjacent ecosystems overlap. In this region, there exist species from both ecosystems as well as unique species specially adapted to conditions of the transition zone. Below is Ian McHarg’s diagram that starts to illustrate this process.

This was relevant on many different scales for us: most obviously, our site was something of a transition between the Sagrada Familia (across the street) and the Barcelona grid. And then on the most personal level, we also realized the gradient between the divisions of architecture and landscape architecture. With this project, it became so clear to me that making the collaboration between architecture and landscape architecture normal creates a new and better understanding of the possibilities of public space. The plants were not the stars of the show and neither were the humans, rather it focused on connecting and creating environments at a variety of scales, something I truly hope to take with me in future work.