Landscape as Digital Media

The course will be an introduction to digital modeling and representational tools for designers. Through the course, students will gain knowledge of digital media and tools through a number of exercises that will model and simulate natural and dynamic processes in landscape architecture. Along with an introduction to digital drawing and modeling skills, an emphasis will be placed on exploiting the capacity for design software and diagramming techniques to model and represent difference and transformation over time in landscape patterns and formations. To date, digital media for landscape architecture has been largely used as tools for communicating design intentions through representations of complete and static forms and organizations. Given that landscape architecture as a discipline and practice is invested in the effect of time and change on our environments, the course will pursue a more explicit engagement with the capacities for digital media to communicate this temporal aspect of landscape material organizations. Various processes ranging from natural hydrological patterns to the changes in landscape formations over time will be represented and diagrammed. In this course, students will be introduced to CAD, 3d modeling, animation and parametric software. The course will be conducted as a weekly seminar in the computer lab. Exercises will be introduced and developed within class time with a final document of the exercises to be submitted for course grading.