This exercise explores the techniques of representing landform in drawing and model.  The challenge is less about accuracy, but more about representation and conceptual understanding.  A piece of local topography is first selected and drawn as-is.  Then it is sliced and diced, mirrored and reflected, stretched and compressed…any kind of free transformation was utilized to explore the characteristics of the landform.  The last steps was picking a landscape term at random, and represent that in the manipulated landform.  The term I chose was revetment, commonly defined as “a facing of masonry or the like, especially for protecting an embankment.”  The term was represented by sliding strips of rock-representing material into the alternating slots of a section model.  The simple act highlighted the non-structural characteristic of revetment.

As simple as this exercise may seem, the lesson was valuable for all future project reference. First, contours/topographies are manmade abstractions; there are no “contour lines” in nature.  Making lines on paper may mean very different things in reality.  Second, section topo-models read a lot smoother than pancake topo-models; choose wisely depending on what one wants to represent and emphasize.