Landscape Media 1

Related Staff : Pat Xiao

Robin Evans once claimed that architects don’t make buildings but representations of it. This course aims to critically introduce and explore the media of landscape and representation skills like drawing and fabrication. We don’t simply treat drawing forms as the media of landscape imagination, but carefully examine the media of landscape, the media of drawing, and the intervals between them. The drawing in landscape architecture, as James Corner described, can be “a plot, necessarily strategic, maplike, and acted upon in essence.” We think of drawing landscape as a process which let us to experience and express what we see and conceive, and moreover, to speculate and construct in the physical space. The course focused entirely on non-digital forms of drafting as an essential set of techniques for documenting, analyzing, and generating ideas. We The course introduced a series of techniques weekly based on the categorized media of drawing and fabrication (projection, notation, and representation), to communicate the media of landscape (spatiality, temporality, and experience). The course works required engagement with drawing grammar (perspective, orthographic projection), denotative interpretation (notation, diagram), material expression (physical model, collage, mapping), and narrative construction (montage, animation). Particular attention was paid to understanding the complex mechanism in the dynamic, projective, and dialectical constructed network of design, media, and imagination.