Context Free

When I started to think through the logic of context free, I began to realize that it would be easier to program the park and its geometry through a series of interrelated sketches, that would all act in a different geometric logic. This way, the park elements, elevation, trees and walkway could each have their own logic, and not be dependent on the geometry that came before it. Thus, the final park design is shown by overlapping the different images that came out of each [ground, tree and walkway] script.

Before constructing any of the scripts, I decided on fractal logic, where each square of the park was divided into sections. Given that the original park was a 2:1 rectangle, this act of subdivision allows me to keep the existing geometry of the park constant. From there it was a matter of modifying a subdivision script, consisting of a 2:1 outline shape, and a 1:1 4-square, or 9-square fractal shape. This is derived from the quad city example script that uses a whole and quads to make city fractals.

To design each layer, I modified the chance that each QUAD shape rule would be selected. By doing so, I could affect the chance of subdivisions in the design. By doing this, I could make a park with fewer subdivisions, or one with more subdivisions depending what the aesthetics of the park element called for. For the landscape element, I made sure that none of the squares were white and tried to represent a pixel-like map of the topology. This resulted in a number of larger fields, and then many smaller fields that could represent a rapid change in elevation.

For the trees I utilized a rotated 9-square subdivision. The reason for the 9-square subdivision is that in a non-rotated configuration, the center square could be empty, and could approximate the organization of trees around a field. By rotating the subdivided square I could achieve a pseudo-random organization that approximated the organization of trees better than a non-rotated square could.

Finally, for the walkways script, I changed the chance of subdivision to be very low, so that the park would be subdivided into larger shapes. Each square was colored to represent a specific quadrant of a circle. This in effect generates a programmed pathway that is determined by adjacent squares. In theory this works, but in practice the represented quadrant had to be fudged a little bit, since the individual subdivisions did not have an awareness of the colors around them.