HKU Moodle

This design studio, the first in the PDLA & MLA curriculum, expands upon fundamental skills learned in the PDLA Summer Intensive and builds greater capacities in conceptual thinking, analysis and process, and practices of landscape architecture. The studio is deeply engaged in observation and inquiry, where each student will explore the dynamism of landscapes and engage with sites of flux. These fundamentals will be rooted in an exploration of reading and representing place, relation, material, time, and process. We will emphasize drawing and modeling on rigorous and critical practices. Design in this course is defined as something that emerges from the site itself and your own experiences with it. 

This year's iteration of the course also experiments with notions of the mediated landscape, where 'seeing' landscapes includes not only first-person sensory experiences, but also the observations drawing across scales from simulations and analyses exracted from other representations of the places. The studio is structured around the themes of gradient (as opposed to boundary); network (as opposed to object); and parameter (as opposed to dimension). 

What is landscape? How might it be interpreted, engaged, represented, described, classified, and shaped? This course explores landscape architecture as a profession, and landscape acting as a discipline, a medium, and an idea. As an introduction to the topic, students are challenged to think critically about landscape in ways that shape an expanded understanding for the relationship between individuals and environment. This expanded understanding will be developed through the actions of looking, interpreting, reading, discussing, and ultimately representing landscape. Each of these activities can help reveal the layered conditions, relationships, and processes embedded in any landscape. The sequence of lectures is topically structured with each week focused on a particular framing or expression of landscape. This is a reading and discussion intensive course. Students are expected to arrive at each session having critically reviewed that week’s readings, identifying topics and questions for discussion.