MLA1 – Learning to See and Share
Studio 1 emphasizes building landscape literacy and instilling a sense of agency within students early in the curriculum. First, students learn to read, interpret, and draw the components, systems, processes and interactions of the built and natural landscape around them. Then, they engage with their own ability to alter the inner workings of that landscape through simple, but meaningful intervention. After carefully studying a local post-industrial landscape through various drawing and modeling exercises, students design their own strange terrains that take advantage of the processes, relationships and dynamic systems they have become very familiar with. The studio introduces landscape as the tangible, alter-able places we engage with every day, grounding and giving students power to act. Students leave the studio with an intelligence and confidence about terrain, the forces and processes that shape it, and how those forces and processes can be leveraged through design.
Students are first tasked with recurrently mapping the dynamics of three small (1m2) post-industrial sites over the course of several weeks through a series of hand-drawn diagrammatic plan drawings and full scale section drawings. Using the set of drawings as a tool for exploration, students attempt to unpack the underlying dynamics of their small sites as they carefully capture change through time across the study period.
Students are first tasked with recurrently mapping the dynamics of three small (1m2) post-industrial sites over the course of several weeks through a series of hand-drawn diagrammatic plan drawings and full scale section drawings. Using the set of drawings as a tool for exploration, students attempt to unpack the underlying dynamics of their small sites as they carefully capture change through time across the study period.
Students are first tasked with recurrently mapping the dynamics of three small (1m2) post-industrial sites over the course of several weeks through a series of hand-drawn diagrammatic plan drawings and full scale section drawings. Using the set of drawings as a tool for exploration, students attempt to unpack the underlying dynamics of their small sites as they carefully capture change through time across the study period.
Students are first tasked with recurrently mapping the dynamics of three small (1m2) post-industrial sites over the course of several weeks through a series of hand-drawn diagrammatic plan drawings and full scale section drawings. Using the set of drawings as a tool for exploration, students attempt to unpack the underlying dynamics of their small sites as they carefully capture change through time across the study period.
Next, each student is tasked with designing an intervention that meaningfully engages with the existing site dynamics - transforms them, amplifies them, shifts them or reshapes them. There need not be an ecological, social or cultural function to the intervention. Rather, focus is placed on meaningfully engaging with what exists to create a new or transformed condition. Drawings are made to speculate what the new site will look like one-year after intervening.
Next, the studio produces a library of small models capturing the wide range of novel ecologies on the site.
In the final assignment, students design their own terrain built through landscape processes and occurring over a minimum of three (3) specific operational and ecological opportunities and limitations. Each phase should result in a form at the scale of the body, and should be assigned a timescale on which to operate. Operations/phases can include excavation, deposition, material application, structural application or soil property alteration.
In the final assignment, students design their own terrain built through landscape processes and occurring over a minimum of three (3) specific operational and ecological opportunities and limitations. Each phase should result in a form at the scale of the body, and should be assigned a timescale on which to operate. Operations/phases can include excavation, deposition, material application, structural application or soil property alteration.
In the final assignment, students design their own terrain built through landscape processes and occurring over a minimum of three (3) specific operational and ecological opportunities and limitations. Each phase should result in a form at the scale of the body, and should be assigned a timescale on which to operate. Operations/phases can include excavation, deposition, material application, structural application or soil property alteration.
Related people:
Emily Knox