The SAD Design Method vs.

Pattern Analysis
and Design
(This is an edited version of an an article by Tom Turner which appeared in
Landscape Design October 1991)

The classical twentieth century approach to landscape design has been Survey-
Analysis- Design (SAD). It has been elevated to the status of a design
methodology and cruelly overworked. The resultant places lacked clarity of
intention. Too often, they were a muddy compromise between innovation and
conservation. The SAD method produced sad results. It should be put out to
grass like a pool old tired horse.

In the late unlamented days of the Landscape Institute Part 3 Design Set Piece
Examination, it was scarcely possible to succeed without adopting a SAD
approach.

Examiners were issued with pre-printed mark sheets. Boxes assigned

percentages to ‘Survey’, ‘Analysis’ and ‘Design’. Students felt compelled to use
what became known as the ‘Three Sheet Method’, or the supercharged ‘Five
Sheet Variant’ (with two additional sheets, named ‘Appraisal’ and ‘Concept’).

This article, which arises from work at University of Greenwich (then Thames
Polytechnic), puts forward one of the alternatives to the SAD method. Since the
Diploma with Honours Course was re-planned in 1990, half of the time has been
given to landscape planning, in the belief that a lack of good landscape planning
in the UK is the crucial obstacle to better landscape design. Work with the
European Education Exchange (ELEE) programme indicates that the dominance
of the SAD method is primarily in the Anglo- Saxon countries.

SAD methodology

I spoke to an artist last year who had employed a landscape architect to design a
garden. The client felt alarmed and threatened by an ‘analysis drawing’ which, he
said, had arrows stabbing into the garden from different directions, ‘like a co-
ordinated panzer attack’. The conversation reminded me of some diagrams
which I once prepared (c 1980) to illustrate the SAD method (Fig 1). I guess that:

 the origins of the SAD method lie in eighteenth century England.

 the SAD method reached the present day profession via twentieth century
Scotland, through the work of Patrick Geddes and Ian McHarg.

The chief flaw in the SAD method is the endeavour to derive values from facts.
This is scientific determinism with totalitarian implications. Any person or
machine using deterministic methods ‘should’ reach the same conclusion. Ian

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McHarg, the leading landscape planner of the l970s, specifically stated that when
using his Ecological Method: ‘any man, assembling the same evidence, would
come to the same conclusion”. To escape the inherent determinism of the
method, some proponents allowed a ‘creative leap’ between Analysis and
Design, but the circumstances were not propitious. As Peter Youngman often
noted at Thames, ‘a great lion of a survey leads to a little mouse of a design’.
This is not to criticise the single agreen law of landscape design: ‘consult the
genius of the place’; surveys must be done.

The leading planning theorist of the 1970s (J Brian McLouglin) summarised the
SAD method as follows, with regard to planning and to Patrick Geddes: ‘His
message was very clearly stated in the now-famous cycle of ‘survey, analysis
and plan’. The approach revolved around simultaneous awareness, or ‘synoptic
vision’ of ‘Place, Work and Folk’. His influence has been extremely powerful both
for good and ill. The great benefit of the Geddesian heritage is a very healthy
concern for his principle of diagnosis before treatment, understanding before
action. But on the debit side, misunderstanding and unimaginative interpretation
of his message has led to a tendency towards collecting information for its own
sake... Worst of all, many plans seem to bear little if any relationship to these
great catalogues of information; it is almost as if survey or information-collecting
was a kind of ritual behaviour, an appeasement of some planning god to ensure
his blessing on the plan itself.’ Geddes, it should be remembered, was the first
British citizen to describe himself as a ‘landscape architect’, in 1904.

One alternative to the SAD method, with which the Diploma students
experimented in the 1990-91 session, is inspired by the work of Christopher
Alexander. The Timeless Way of Building and A Pattern Language arrived in the
library some 12 years ago. I re-read them in 1986, when writing a book on
Landscape Planning, and noticed that they had hardly been borrowed. But in the
last two years the Pattern Language has become the most sought after book in
the library, by architects, landscape architects and surveyors alike. I do not think
the recommendation has come from staff.

Pattern Analysis

When a child opens its eyes for the first time, a bewildering array of sensory data
comes to view. Pattern recognition was vital to man’s success as a hunter. As
the child grows, it learns to recognise different kinds of pattern: food, mother,
house, friend, heat, fear, work, play, speed, and so forth. The child then learns a
language to describe the patterns. Some pans of the language depend on words,
others on gestures and actions —a raised hand, a kiss, or a certain sitting
position. ‘Leaving home’ implies entering into a new web of physical and social
patterns.

If that child becomes a landscape designer, he or she must learn how places are
made, what makes them ‘good’ or ‘bad’, from various standpoints, and how they

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may be changed. All this requires knowledge of new patterns and of a new
language with which to handle them. The language is more than words. It
embraces actions, habits, models, numbers, diagrams and drawings. They are
used to describe complex processes: erosion, growth, transport, energy,
diversity, security, enclosure, circulation, proportion, texture and grain. Some
parts of the language will be shared with the general population. Others will be
unique to planners and landscape designers; others to the individual. In talking of
landscape design, many general ideas can be described as patterns. The word
provides a common currency to exchange the different ways of analysing places.
We can speak of Crowe Patterns, Alexander Patterns, Day Patterns and others
too (Fig 2).

 In Alexander’s usage, a ‘pattern’ is an archetype for a special kind of good

place.
 In Crowe’s usage, it is a physical or biological pattern which results from
the evolutionary forces which have created the landscape. She explains in
The Pattern of Landscape that she ‘tried to trace the links between the
physical functioning of the earth’s surface and the response it evokes from
men”.
 In Day’s usage, pattern means ornament. He wrote that the artist regards
the structure of pattern ‘as a source of inspiration even, which to neglect
would seem to him wasteful of artistic opportunity”.

An Alexander Pattern is a three-part rule, which expresses a relation between a

certain context, a problem, and a solution. For example, his Pattern No. 112,
ENTRANCE TRANSITION, describes first the context and problem that
‘Buildings, and especially houses, with a graceful transition between the street
and the inside, are more tranquil than those which open directly off the street’,
and then the solution that designers should ‘make a transition between the street
and the front door. Bring the path which connects street and entrance through
this transition space, and mark it with a change of light, a change of sound, a
change of direction, a change of surface, a change of level, perhaps by gateways
which make a change of enclosure, and above all with a change of view’.

The approach to landscape planning which derives from the Alexander and
Crowe uses of ‘pattern’ proceeds as follows:

 analyse the Crowe Patterns which underlie the existing landscape

 analyse the Alexander Patterns which could satisfy the requirements of
client groups
 overlay and integrate the existing and proposed patterns to formulate a
landscape plan.

When extending the method into design, ‘pattern’ can also be used, as in Day’s
book, to provide a third category of input: geometrical patterns from nature, the
fine arts, decoration, or visual design. ‘Patterns’ can also come from history,

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theatre, poetry, philosophy and elsewhere. Bernard Tschumi used overlain
geometrical patterns to generate the most innovatory park design of the 1980s:
Parc de la Villette. His plan is visually and philosophically dynamic. But it is
shallow: function is made to follow form; the urban ecosystem is disregarded.
Architectural theory is deconstructed. Verily, this is architecture against itself. La
Villette is a folly et une folie. Geometrical patterns are an insufficient basis for
design.

SAD Landscape Theory

The survey-analysis-design (SAD) procedure is an aspect of functionalism that is

well known inside the design professions but poorly understood by outsiders
(Figure 13.3). It would be advantageous if experienced planners and designers
were to write about it, as Sturt wrote of the wheelwright's craft. Future historians
will have to understand this procedure if they are to understand twentieth century
cities. The SAD method of planning began with Patrick Geddes. As a scientist, a
sociologist and a geographer, he was disenchanted with the engineers' and
architects' approaches, which saw city planning as a technical exercise. Take the
example of a new street. To the engineer, it was a traffic artery. To the architect,
it could also be a visual axis. To Geddes, it should be a vital component of civic
structure, affecting regional development, history, culture and everything else.
Geddes therefore required a full survey and analysis as a prelude to plan-
making. Undoubtedly, he was correct. The problems arose when SAD came to
be used by less-enlightened people. Engineers were delighted with the SAD
method. Before planning a new street, they surveyed and analysed the existing
traffic. If vehicular flow was surveyed at twice the volume of existing street
capacity, they doubled the size of the street. Similarly, architects surveyed the
function of a building before producing a plan. This led to the notorious idea of a
house as a "machine for living'.

Lewis Mumford, who admired Geddes, recognized Ian McHarg's Design with
Nature (McHarg, 1971) as a scion of Geddes' Cities in Evolution (Geddes, 1915),
and agreed to write an introduction to the book. In it, Mumford praises the
empirical foundation of McHarg's ecological method:

He seeks, not arbitrarily to impose design, but to use to the fullest the
potentialities -- and with them, necessarily, the restrictive conditions -- that nature
offers.

As the ecological method rested on "imitating nature', McHarg was led to believe
that "any man, assembling the same evidence, would come to the same
conclusion' (McHarg, 1971). This is naked determinism, red in tooth and claw.
Much as I admire Geddes, Mumford and McHarg too, this particular claim
appears wholly misleading. The two excellent features of McHarg's method are
his single-topic analytical drawings and his Suitability Maps. Conventional Master
Plans look to some point in the distant future. They are incomplete for a quarter

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of a century and out of date thereafter. McHarg's Suitability Maps are modest by
comparison: they imply a desire to guide the future, not to exert control.

The deductive aspect of McHarg's ecological method needs to be reconsidered.

If landscape design is, to any degree, a fine art, then it simply cannot use a
deterministic methodology. Neither ecological determinism nor any other kind of
determinism will suffice. Davies and Shakespeare (Davies and Shakespeare,
1993), after working on a project in Paris, declared that:

Landscape design is a form of artistic expression. Designers need freedom to

explore the realm of the imagination... We believe the Billancourt project was a
triumph for the use of metaphor... By abandoning the SAD method, the groups
were able to determine the direction of their schemes very early on. Predictability
was broken by taking this high risk route. Ian McHarg might have commented
that "every group assembling the same evidence has come to a completely
different conclusion'

Like John Dixon Hunt, they overemphasize the role of landscape design as a fine
art. The above quotation highlights the role of metaphor and gives tertiary
patterns a key role in the design process. This does not detach the process from
the existing site but it does effect a considerable widening of horizons, towards
the world of ideas. It also rests upon inductive logic at least as much as upon
deductive logic. The relationship between the SAD and metaphorical approaches
is shown by a comparison of Figure 3 with Figure 4. Both begin with the existing
site, but only the SAD procedure is constrained by the existing site. The SAD
procedure derives a design from a small input of information, because the design
process is limited by the boundary of the existing site. Metaphorical approaches
draw in more information.

Another problem for the survey--analysis--design method is that it does not

accord with our knowledge of how designers actually operate. Schemes often
spring into designers' minds at an early stage. After being recorded on the back
of an envelope, or a wine-stained table napkin, the scheme is developed over
months and years. The process is not linear: it follows different paths. When
experienced practitioners recommend the SAD method, it is usually a case of
"Do as I say, not as I do'.

References:

http://www.gardenvisit.com/history_theory/garden_landscape_design_articles/de
sign_methods/sad_design_method#ixzz0ocVeOTL1

http://www.gardenvisit.com/history_theory/library_online_ebooks/architecture_cit
y_as_landscape/sad_landscape_theory#ixzz0ocW9jt4w