Floodlands Landscape design experience with boundary methods and lessons one can draw from stories concerning rural backgrounds

Abstract

Inspired on Yoknapatawpha’s space-time creations, “Floodlands” is an effort performed at the University of Alicante (Spain) to emulate Faulkner and other authors’ complex univers (spatial elements, characters, dates, human roles…) and the result of the concoction of all the narratives used to inspire a group of students to find landscape solutions to issues of adaptation, coexistence and controversies detected in the literary texts.

This research collaborative project participated by sociologist, language and architecture students deals with the new rural and with architectures sensitive to global warming. The first aim was to obtain a set of architectural designs for a fictitious valley in the Southeast of Spain to establish a series of rules for harmonious coexistence with natural landscapes having eco-villages as the basis of our ideal. The second aim was to visualize the social relations and atmospheres expressed in the projects, as if it were almost an embodied (visual) experience.

Keywords: New rural, kinegram, empathic writing