The studio is supported by Seminar and Lecture Series that take place during Terms 1 and 2. In addition to mandatory attendance at these events, students are required to make presentations and to undertake 4 essays.
A series of weekly lectures, approximately an hour in length, are followed by an opportunity for students to discuss the issues raised. Appropriate reading for each lecture is indicated in advance, with a broader reading list provided for each course.
The general aim of the Lecture and Seminar Series is to:
-offer a critical theoretical basis for Studio Work
-provide a broad platform of knowledge of contemporary landscape and urban projects being undertaken in Europe and worldwide that demonstrate issues and methodologies relevant to the Studio Work
-provide technical information concerning the ecological and sustainable issues that inform current work
-promote independent research and its synthesis in written papers
Douglas Spencer
Traces the origins of ecological and metabolic urbanism, critically explores the contributions of systems theory, and examines the thought of figures such as Patrick Geddes, Felix Guattari and David Harvey. Students will be introduced to the historical development of grid-based, cartographic and prototypical methods and will be required to critically assess these alongside a range of wpecific case studies.
This series of sessions will be taught alongside the studio, where questions of process, matter, becoming and objecthood will be set alongside landscape and urban modelling as a basis from which to discuss matters of design and territorial concerns.
Douglas Spencer & Clara Oloriz
This seminar addresses certain key points and practices in the historical development of cartography as a representational device. Methods of mapping are explored in terms of their uses, implications and potentials so as to critically inform the drafting of a cartogenetic manifesto and the writing of the final project thesis.
Félix Guattari, in his essay ‘On Machines’ proposed that the concept of the ‘technological machine’ be expanded to one of the ‘machinic assemblage’. This ‘machine’, he writes, ‘is open to the outside and its machinic environment and maintains all kinds of relationships to social components and individual subjectivities’. Following this proposition, this new lecture series, which introduces students to a range of construction techniques related to the design of landscape projects, adopts a ‘machinic’ ethos to technical practice. Rather than a remedial or problem-solving approach, then, it addresses the generative potential of technical methods and their capacity to produce new territories openly engaged with environmental, social and subjective conditions.
The unit will address a range of practices, principles and conditions — such as wetland generation, microclimatic strategies, slope stability and landscape ecology — and will include the critical analysis of a range of sites, case studies and built examples.
This series of lectures from members of the Ove Arup Environmental Unit introduces the environmental engineering processes and concerns related to the sustainable management and development of landscape. A series of experts will introduce students to the tools that can be used to analyse or monitor processes associated with their particular areas of interest. Case studies will be used to illustrate the various techniques employed for water management and retention, air and soil pollution etc.
