How do you help people embrace change and adaptation in the design of physical places?
Winner, ASLA Honor Award, 2018
Walking into Marnas in Southern Sweden is like walking into a fairy tale, full of magical encounters and metaphors that amplify ideas and experiences we find in the outside world. Created over the course of 50 years by landscape architect Sven-Ingvar Andersson, the garden is known among designers as a laboratory for testing ideas about open frameworks, in which details evolve in response to changing needs and desires.
From Sven-Ingvar’s writings and thousands of photos of the garden taken between the 1950s and the 2000s, we created an immersive, interactive experience of Marnas in space and time, enabling the visitor to wander through the garden as it existed during its designer’s lifetime and to feel the interplay between garden form, ideas, and the practice of gardening. I was responsible for creating a series of video meditations that visitors encounter in an online self-guided tour.
For each video, we chose words and image sequences that could convey a strong sense of place and memory—sometimes directly related to the space in which a visitor would encounter the video, such as the “Henyard” or the “Portal of Death”; sometimes launching into other places or across decades.
We also crafted a longer film version of the tour of the spaces and eras of the garden which allowed us to convey a broader manifesto about how to design environments that can adapt to change. The project won the American Association of Landscape Architects Honor Award in 2018.
Role: Multimedia Designer
For: MIT DUSP
Date: 2018
Type: narrative strategy, research
Directed by: Anne Whiston Spirn
Web Design by: Zhao Ma & Halla Moore
Interactive Online Tour
Video Episodes
Full Film (21:32)
