Knowing your environment

Knowing the room you're going to work with is very important when you're working with any kind of architecture. A room can be vast and it can be tiny. No matter what you need to get a feel for it and understand it. The above are two pictures taken during a workshop I was part of during my years at SLU, when we worked with spaces. By moving around in the room, sitting still, using our own bodies to build structures, we learned how room structures work. It was a very interesting workshop in that it brought up a lot of things we tend to take for granted, or think we know, and we got insights in how room structures affects us and how we can affect a room, and change the impression of a space.

A good experience is to empty a room completely, move around in it, stand in different places and think about where you prefer to be and where you don't wish to be. Why is that? Bring the furniture back in, one at the time and place them carefully in the room, based on what you found out when the room was empty. You'll get a whole new room. It's a bit more difficult to do that in a garden, but it's still possible to feel the space and think about improvements.