Landscape, Infrastructure, Intervention
We explored how the physical, material, and conceptual understanding of landscape can enrich current forms of architectural and urban design practice, and to introduce landscape thinking into students’ design vocabularies.
This seminar aims to explore how the physical, material and conceptual understanding of landscape can enrich current forms of architectural and urban design practice, and to introduce landscape thinking into students’ design vocabularies. Given that topography and ecology are two discourses that increasingly impinge on the fields of architecture and urban design today, it may be argued that landscape in the broadest sense of the term begins to assume a new stature as a design discipline, both literally and metaphorically. This is particularly apparent where landform and built form are combined together in infrastructural interventions at an urban or regional scale.
A parallel objective of the seminar is to begin to develop a shared language and historical narrative based in an understanding of the urban territory as landscape, and to create a ground for practice that recognizes, as Bob Somol puts it, “the proliferation of the urban everywhere.”
To this end, students will be asked to produce an investigative work to include images, drawings, and text of one urban landscape project in the form of 10-15 pages, due Exam/paper week. This report will be developed by each student in conjunction with his or her project oral presentation.
Class meetings are organized topically and will alternate between two types. One type works with readings drawn from landscape architecture, art, ecology, and geography, and is anchored by presentations by invited speakers and class discussion. These sessions will be punctuated by student presentations of related projects, which approach these issues through the concrete parameters of built work.
Course Requirements:
Students are expected to do all of the assigned reading, to actively participate in class discussion, and to prepare questions for invited speakers. Students will be asked to work either individually or in teams of 2 to present an investigation and critical understanding, to include drawings and text, of one urban landscape project. This assignment will take the form of both a class presentation and a paper, which includes text, images, diagrams, plans, and sections as necessary to describe the physical, conceptual and operational aspects of the project. Some class time will be dedicated to desk crits on this exercise. Students may also be asked to prepare a series of brief issues papers or question sets based on reactions to specific readings and lecture topics, as well as the Nature Now Symposium on Oct 14. One seminar reader, which includes most of the required reading, will be available on reserve in the library.
Students should consider purchasing these books for background reading and reference materials:
Corner, James, ed. Recovering Landscape: Essays in Contemporary Landscape Architecture, 1999.
Berrizbeita and Pollak, Inside Outside: Between Architecture and Landscape, Birkhauser, 2001.