BA (Hons) Landscape Architecture

Tutors:

Core LA team Lucas Hughes Eccles Ng Dawn Parke

School of Architecture and Design Dr Matthew Jones Tom Tebby Jason Taylor

Studio Assistants Daniela Teleku Lydia Glanville Kika Vernon Yuting Sun

Visiting Tutors: John Newman Claire Hunt Paj Valley Rebecca Skeffington Sam Roberts

BA Landscape Architecture Alumni 2017-20

Each project here, explores a unique challenge that faces our spatial environment, considering both nature and human centric perspectives.

As our societies and ecologies strain from the global threats of growing population, pressure on resources, and climate change; we explore ways to better safeguard our shared future. The role of the Landscape Architect in this time has never been more important.

As a team we believe in innovation across the many facets of the discipline, seeing theoryand practice as one and the same. We encourage our students to test boundaries, leading through their personal exploration, experiment and design application-led approaches.

The work here, therefore celebrates the variety and dynamism of the current Landscape Architecture discipline. The speculative projects illustrated have embraced the themes of community, health and wellbeing, future living and sustainable landscapes. Students have risen to these challenges and provide great hope for our future.

The final year Landscape Architecture students have been exploring integrated ways to drive design in ways that are critical and practical, that have a theoretical foudantion and real-world practice application. They have debated our most pressing contemporary topics, have explored collaborative ways of working and experimented with their own unique responses through highly iterative and reflective design process.

Sam Brittain - The Precious Ground at Didcot Power Station

Before commencing year 3, students are tasked with defining a subject of personal, particular interest related to important issues in contemporary landscape architecture theory and practice. Students’ research projects and theoretical explorations underpined their choice of site and inspired each design ideation. These concepts and strategies were rigorously tested and applied across the scales from regional, site and design detailing.

Initially, students develop a broad idea for their own research opportunity and design project site options. They considered how ideas work both in theory and practice. These are ideas that connect their increasingly in-depth research (the questioning) to their increasingly dynamic practice (the doing). Students innovated their own process, through experimentation and consideration of how to disseminate with a wider audience. They analysed the site at a large scale, understanding layers of physical and socio-cultural conditions to form strategic frameworks for their design. They compared and contrasted their own values and perspectives with those of likely project stakeholders.

To create a vision for their site this year’s students were asked to create a concept through a kind of storytelling about the place, something meaningful about the site that would engage and inspire a future generation of visitors, which might take on multiple lenses of critical analysis; from the scientific to the artistic. They combined the abstract with the pragmatic, testing the

boundaries and the scope of landscape architecture. They defined the practical elements of their sites and imbued them with layers of meaning, intertwining both tangible and intangible aspects of the place, for example: • How would this place be experienced as a sequence of spaces? • What should the place reveal or hide of its social, cultural and historic roots? • How would the design impact on sensory human experience?

Taking this forward, these ideas were refined and tested against a variety of needs relating to the site, with a desire to maximise the value based on a range of appropriate attributes. Sites were designed with dynamic experiences and functions, each underpinned by the conceptual framework defined earlier. Designs were realised in increasing detail, toward the human scale and the realworld experience of the end user. In the final stage of this process, students demonstrated how the material composition of their project would be realised.

This included both the biotic and abiotic components of the soft green planting with the hard-constructed elements. Drawings and specifications were also included which could be taken by a contractor to move the project from its theoretical origins into a real-world physical outcome.

Students will take these ideas, values and skills with them into their future careers in the landscape architecture profession.

Mingzhu Liu - a Human strategy for Huimin Street, Xi‘an Yuanyuan Xia - Euston Station Park

Lan Xiong - Redevelopment of Birmingham Flower Market

Reuben McCalla - One Love, Marina Bay, Kingston