Columbia University GSAPP
Fall 2002 - present

This seminar aims to explore how the physical, material and conceptual understanding of landscape can enrich current forms of architectural and urban design practice, and to introduce landscape thinking into students' design vocabularies. Given that topography and ecology are two discourses that increasingly impinge on the fields of architecture and urban design today, it may be argued that landscape in the broadest sense of the term begins to assume a new stature as a design discipline, both literally and metaphorically. This is particularly apparent where landform and built form are combined together in infrastructural interventions at an urban or regional scale.

A parallel objective of the seminar is to begin to develop a shared language and historical narrative based in an understanding of the urban territory as landscape, and to create a ground for practice that recognizes, as Bob Somol puts it, "the proliferation of the urban everywhere."

To this end, students will be asked to produce an investigative work to include images, drawings, and text of one urban landscape project in the form of 10-15 pages, due Exam/paper week. This report will be developed by each student in conjunction with his or her project oral presentation. Reports will be compiled by the instructor into a book and redistributed to the class as a primer on ideas and projects at the intersection of landscape, infrastructure and architecture.

Class meetings are organized topically and will alternate between two types. One type works with readings drawn from landscape architecture, art, ecology, and geography, and is anchored by presentations by invited speakers and subsequent class discussion. These sessions will be punctuated by student presentations of related projects, which approach these issues through the concrete parameters of built work.

Written by SCAPE.