Course program
The course aims to provide students with multidisciplinary tools and knowledge to address the theme of risk through landscape design. The guiding hypothesis is that risk prevention, vulnerability reduction, and the safety enhancement of settlements and open spaces can serve as a strategy to interpret the specificities and diversities of territories. It initiates improvement processes that impact spaces, lifestyles, behaviors, and economies, reactivating maintenance and care related to local productions, activities, and resources.
Students will be guided in the development of a landscape urban renewal project aimed at increasing the resilience of urban areas and settled communities. The project specifically aims to create a healthy city, ensuring accessibility and sustainability of movements, public health, and the reduction of environmental and social risks.
The activities of the laboratory are organized into two sections:
A. Contemporary Landscape; B. Four Moves for Landscape Design.
The two sections do not follow a hierarchical sequence but define a single knowledge circle that will be revisited multiple times to highlight, at each step, the connections between technical knowledge and design interpretation, avoiding any distinction between "theory and practice."
A. CONTEMPORARY LANDSCAPE:
Through space transformation, landscape design is the most effective and convincing tool to interpret and express the ways of life, tastes, aspirations, and needs expressed by contemporary society. This section is organized through the presentation of design research developed by the teaching group and a critical selection of the most significant "author projects" at the center of the most recent and important cultural events and disciplinary debates (frontal lectures).
B. FOUR MOVES FOR LANDSCAPE DESIGN:
The process of landscape design construction describes a dynamic circular (feedback) process that links three elements together, each of which influences and is influenced by the others: the physical elements of the design (understood as problem data), the questions arising from contemporary society (the theme emerging from the listening of the subjects), and the individual capacity of each designer to develop the theme through the interpretation of elements (composition).
Operationally, the interdisciplinary design process will be explained through four distinct phases of work and communicated through respective materials:
B1. Problems and Context: Selecting the project theme. The first move aims to understand the context (the working area) by identifying its problems. The landscape project finalizes this first move.
B2. Layering: Transformations and evolutions. Identifying the causes of the problems. Once the project theme is defined, the second move focuses on identifying the causes of the main problem to be addressed through the landscape project ("how did we arrive at this situation?").
B3. Strategy and Project Development: After identifying the causes behind the context's problems, the third move aims to define the landscape project's strategy.
B4. Thematic Deepening and Communication: Technical verification and representation. After outlining the landscape project's strategy (objectives, actions, subjects, and spaces involved, expected space transformations), the fourth move aims to explore and technically validate some design solutions through spatial simulations. Thematic in-depth areas will be investigated concerning expected landscape transformations, to be assessed and imagined even in their temporal dimension.
Prerequisites
• knowledge of theoretical basis, tools, techniques of landscape architecture and open spaces design;
• Knowledge of traditional and advanced instruments and techniques for cartographic, topographical, spatial and landscape interpretation –
Books
The bibliography will be integrated during frontal lectures and seminars held in the classroom
Frequency
Attendance is mandatory, and the established submission dates are non-negotiable.
Exam mode
The exam is individual, even though the projects can be developed in groups of 2 students.
The following exam materials will be evaluated:
• The exercises assigned during the first part of the program (A. Contemporary Landscape).
• The project works related to the second part of the program (B. Four Moves for Landscape Design).
• The notebook, which can be freely organized and must contain lecture notes, bibliographical references, summaries of field visits, and any study and reflection materials produced during the Laboratory and aimed at the development of the interdisciplinary landscape project. Both exercises and notebooks are individual assignments.
Lesson mode
The lecture schedule follows the development and execution of the course's operational program. Field trips and classroom work and review sessions alternate with the lectures.
