Landscape Design Studio 3
Bachelor Year 3 Semester 1
Full portfolio available at:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ccTW22TgjVAk0ZqdoL2xGEx8adBVfwWA/view?usp=sharing
Course Introduction
This studio looks at landscape as a product of the interaction of numerous natural and man-made systems (rather than just as a set of objects) and helps students to develop skills in researching, observing, interpreting, recording and representing the landscape. It looks to develop students’ abilities to analyse, conceptualise and present integrated and meaningful designs for site-scale landscape interventions.
The course emphasizes the use of physical models, aligned with analytical drawing, as part of the design process, as a way of conveying not only spatial forms and material qualities but a broader narrative of past histories, current interpretations, and possible futures.
The whole of the Ho Chung River corridor (at Sai Kung, Hong Kong) is taken as a study territory for the course, leading to consecutive four assignments.
Project 1: Theoretical readings
Students read and develop an explanatory / interpretive response to an assigned text relating to narrative forms of landscape representation. The response is presented in the form of a ~3 min video.
Project 2: Narrative model
Students are assigned into one of three groups (of 4-5 students), each looking at a different section of the Ho Chung River system. My given site is Shui Hau with foci on rural settlement / fields / streams. Each group is tasked to build a detailed and accurately scaled 1:500 topographic model of their section of the river corridor.
Project 3: Photographic images, sectional elevation, landscape detail
This project continues with thorough site and documentary investigation of the Ho Chung Valley and an extensive examination of precedents for the narrative model.
Project 4: Design Intervention
Students are required to identify a location along the stream / river, and design a small-scale physical intervention along some part of the waters edge to allow residents / visitors to (re-)negotiate the transition between the land and the water.
Project 1 video: