Erasing the Line While Drawing

. . . la «chora» platonicienne est à la fois matrice et empreinte, notre milieu est à notre égard dans un état de mouvance passive et active: il est le domaine dans lequel nous agissons, et qui porte les marques de cette action, mais il est aussi le domaine qui nous affecte, et auquel nous appartenons de quelque manière . . . —Augustin Berque Ecoumene 

This seminar will explore the capacities of rule-based design in landscape architecture. The goal of the seminar is to challenge the design processes of contemporary practice with the goal to find new methods to approach the inclusion of the logic of the biophysical world in our proposals. Through a series of short weekly exercises, we will introduce a series of living elements, such as water, soil, plants, and animals, and we will visualize different scenarios based in their interactions according to their performance and physiology. We will discover the active and passive qualities of those materials, their physicality, and their capacity to change in relation with other elements. We will introduce limiting factors as a tool of design according to their origin. We will also define the limits of their interchange capacities as potential for design. 

The main goal of the seminar is to establish a clear methodology to apply parametric thinking in landscape architecture and a clear distinction of the different steps of design and workflow between levels of abstraction. We will focus on the difference between the geometrical precision of the parametric and relational language, and the organic nature of the physical result due to the behavior of its elements. 

This collaborative endeavor between our abstract way of thinking and the complex dynamics of natural systems will define a new partnership between humans and nonhumans and will prove that the only possible and fruitful collaboration will happen by erasing the line.