Michael R. Van Valkenburgh
Professor in Practice
Department of Landscape Architecture

 

 

Core Studios


 

First Semester Core: Landscape Architecture Design
GSD 1111, Fall
with Michael Blier, Paula Meijerink, Jane Choi

The first of a four-term sequence of landscape design and planning studios, this course introduces the vocabulary for describing, analyzing, and designing landscapes. A series of short design exercises explores the principles and conceptual strategies for organizing and articulating landscape spaces, surfaces, elements and materials. Design proposals will be developed and presented with drawings and models.



Second Semester Core: Landscape Architecture Design
GSD 1112, Spring 2003
with Dorothee Imbert, Mark Klopfer, Paula Meijerink

This course is the second of a four-semester core sequence of landscape design and planning studios. In this semester, students expand their previous investigations into a more complex site and set of design problems. The studio is arranged into a series of independent but related exercises of increasing scale and varying relationships within the context of a university campus. In this design process, natural, temporal, and cultural phenomena inflect program, spatial configuration, and materials. Particular emphasis is placed on topographic manipulations and the use of vegetation as a tool of design. The studio seeks to relate subject matter and technique with courses in technology, planting design, drawing, and history.



Planning and Design of Landscape
GSD 1211, Fall 1998

The fourth-term studio focuses on landscape planning for community development, emphasizing resource management, physical and social structure of community services, spatial organization, and resultant landscape character. Emphasis is placed on the relationship between the values of particular social paradigms and their expression in the landscape.

Students work individually and in teams, utilizing data developed for computer-aided and hand-drawn methods of analysis and design.



Advanced Landscape  
Landscape Architecture Studio 
GSD 1211 and 1212, 1994-95

Conceptual issues in landscape architecture were explored at an advanced level with particular emphasis given to project-scale landscape architecture within the current modes of design inquiry. 

Each studio project explored the interrelationships of form, space, and meaning relative to site and context. Individual projects were discussed by the class with faculty and visitors as a means of developing students' critical skills and personal development as landscape architects. 

Landscape architectural design was reviewed as influenced by site, by context, by program, by precedents and as motivated and informed by the individual differences and personal visions of each student. The studio emphasized design expressions as they relate to cultures and did not emphasize personal expression as it relates to self. The relationship of ideas, site, context, program and users recurred as a base for each project. 

Several smaller projects were undertaken, with a diversity of contexts and programs; the problems included a historic site (Mount Auburn Cemetery), a natural site (meadow on Martha's Vineyard), and the transformation of a quarry site in Swampscott, Massachusetts, into a fish farm. 



First Semester Core
GSD 1111, Fall 1992

The first semester studio introduces students to the means and materials used in ordering the built landscape.

Through the formal manipulation of land, vegetal, and architectural form, landscape spaces of increasing complexity and scale were proposed. The method of inquiry included two interrelated activities—intellectual discourse and formal investigation. The common theme uniting the six projects was a dialogue between ideal issues of order (composition, structure, type) and the circumstantial issues of program and site.

The first two exercises were analytical, requiring students to graphically document an existing Harvard campus landscape and then to analyze the canopy of trees in Harvard Yard. Ordering principles and devices gleaned from that analysis provided the basis for the third project, the design of a temporary, experimental landscape in the Radcliffe Quadrangle. The final projects dealt with spatial enclosure through the bounding and defining of a contemplative garden and with the impact of site circumstances, such as slope, on the plan and section in a design for an observation terrace. This last project drew on issues explored earlier in the semester while focusing on such new concerns as the sculptural potential of land as a medium and the ways in which a landscape can exploit, register, and reveal natural processes and phenomena.