Landscape Representation II

The Landscape Representation II course will examine the relationship between terrain and the dynamic landscape it supports and engenders.

The course explores and challenges the representational conventions of land-forming and supports a landscape architecture design process that posits the landscape as a relational assemblage of dynamic physical and temporal forces. It investigates the making of landforms through its inherent material performance in relation to ecological processes that describe its connectivity to the ordering and making of the landscape which is a reciprocation of forces between itself and its context at specific scales.

Measures of time will be utilized to describe and design the landscape through a comparison of sequence and event, and their intervals, rates, and duration in relation to spatial forces and flows. Time infuses the material reality of the landscape through states of formation: from those that signify stability, through sequences that are predictable and observable processes of change, to those that are uncertain and instantaneous.

Representation is approached as an activity of thinking and making in which knowledge is generated through the work. This facilitates an iterative process of reflection in action, enabling testing in which new knowledge informs subsequent design decisions. The course will introduce methods of associative and generative modelling, and quantitative and qualitative analysis visualized through multiple forms of media. These are decision-making models conceived to imbue interaction between evidence-based variables and design input.

Lectures and lab exercises will provide the foundation for exploration and discussion and exposure to a set of digital techniques for analysing and generating landform processes to advance technical and conceptual ability, as well as to provide a point of departure for an in-depth awareness of landscape precedents and representational techniques.

It aims to provide students with an understanding of landscape as a set of complex systems in which duration and matter are encoded within, and driven by, a changing landscape. The course engages in the advanced exploration of digital media, with an emphasis on responsive and performative modelling as well as the fluid transition between documentation and speculation, 2d and 3d, static and dynamic, and digital and analogue media.