Architecture

This is the PDLA Media I class, Fall 2025.

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).