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Module

APL8022 : Landscape Architecture Studio 2: City as Landscape

  • Offered for Year: 2024/25
  • Module Leader(s): Ms Stef Leach
  • Visiting Lecturer: Mr Scott Matthews
  • Owning School: Architecture, Planning & Landscape
  • Teaching Location: Newcastle City Campus
Semesters

Your programme is made up of credits, the total differs on programme to programme.

Semester 2 Credit Value: 30
ECTS Credits: 15.0
European Credit Transfer System

Aims

To enable students to learn, develop and demonstrate:
- A range of landscape planning and design skills in relation to relatively large scale, extensive and complex landscape issues and problems, with particular reference to large scale landscape-led master-planning for urban inclusivity, adaptation and resilience.
- The ability to integrate a variety of complex and conflicting landscape issues, land-uses and functions.
- A combination of technical, aesthetic, social, environmental and economic competence and realism
- Advanced abilities and skills in responding to a master-planning brief

Outline Of Syllabus

The syllabus and design project work will cover the following topics:

- Undertaking an holistic site surveys and investigations (both empirical and non-empirical), and critical analysis. This will include Creative Skills-Building Workshops: Limbering Up and Aesthetic:

A series of short exercises intended to introduce students to creative aspects of landscape architecture. Workshops are intended to support students in learning the language of landscape both for deciphering existing landscapes, and for embedding narratives in designed landscapes:
1) students will examine the important role of photography for landscape architecture and be introduced to a variety of techniques including panorama and montage, and develop critical and reflexive skills on decisions taken, methods employed and how such practices could be improved.
2) through a series of activities students explore the practice of drawing as a fundamental and inseparable part of the landscape architecture discipline and to engender an experimental critical personal approach to drawing for beginners and experienced alike.

- Collective Landscape Imaginaries Workshop
- The production and communication of imaginative and creative concepts, as well as a set of strategic design principles conceived as a manifesto, as a response to the Landscape Imaginaries exercise to drive urban inclusivity, resilience and adaptation
- The production of integrated, optimal and sustainable solutions in the form of landscape-led action plan
- The illustration and communication of those proposals

Aim and objectives of the design project are linked to the following United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: 3 (good health and well-being), 10 (reduced inequalities), 11 (sustainable cities and communities), 12 (responsible consumption and production), 13 (climate action) and 15 (life on land).

The design project is carried out in part in small groups and in part individually.

Teaching Methods

Teaching Activities
Category Activity Number Length Student Hours Comment
Scheduled Learning And Teaching ActivitiesSmall group teaching24:008:00Critical reviews. PIP in studio. Students present 'City as Landscape' projects in groups/individually.
Scheduled Learning And Teaching ActivitiesSmall group teaching74:0028:00PIP in studio design tutorials.
Scheduled Learning And Teaching ActivitiesSmall group teaching13:003:00Critical review. Students present work in small groups (PIP)
Scheduled Learning And Teaching ActivitiesSmall group teaching33:009:00Developing creative skills through limbering up design studios. (PIP)
Guided Independent StudyProject work1180:00180:00'City as Landscape' Project Work
Guided Independent StudyProject work140:0040:00Limbering Up Project Work
Scheduled Learning And Teaching ActivitiesWorkshops43:0012:00Developing aesthetic skills (photography and drawing).
Scheduled Learning And Teaching ActivitiesFieldwork44:0016:00Site visit.
Scheduled Learning And Teaching ActivitiesDrop-in/surgery11:001:00Drop in surgery for limbering up assessment (PIP)
Scheduled Learning And Teaching ActivitiesModule talk13:003:00PIP in studio or lecture room
Total300:00
Teaching Rationale And Relationship

The design studio is the integrative environment where students can synthesis knowledge from other modules and develop their understanding and skills in the context of a design problem set by tutors. Students are supported in their learning through site visits, briefings, tutorials and critical review). Design tutorials and review are also the principle means through which students receive feedback on their progress.

Studio tuition and review sessions allow for the tutors to assist and encourage students in the development of their projects.

The design studio pedagogy is centred on a dialogic and responsive approach to students’ own creative work and research. Landscape Architecture pedagogy is reliant on a high proportion of independent learning to support the design process. The MOF hours are consistent with this approach.

Assessment Methods

The format of resits will be determined by the Board of Examiners

Other Assessment
Description Semester When Set Percentage Comment
Design/Creative proj2M80Design project 1, group work and individual work. Students give an oral presentation of their design work.
Design/Creative proj2M20Limbering Up embodied narrative group assessment
Assessment Rationale And Relationship

City and Landscape Design Brief:

During design tutorials work will be reviewed and tuition carried out on a weekly basis to encourage progression. The interim critical reviews allow students to learn from each other as well as from the tutor. This reviewing technique also provides practice for the final reviews, and for the kind of presentations commonly expected of landscape professionals in practice.

The presentation of issues analysis, landscape imaginaries for resilience and adaptation, concepts and proposals provides students with the opportunity to explain and communicate the development and depth of their knowledge and understanding.

Assessment of the graphic representation of projects indicates the ability of students to select and use appropriate communication techniques and media for landscape planning projects.

Limbering Up:

The creative project (group) and reflective log (individual) presented by the students on completion of the module capture and synthesize the knowledge and skills developed throughout the semester through briefings, small group tutorials, design surgeries, workshops and critical review.

Reading Lists

Timetable