Landscape Foundation Studio

The studio began with a fundamental premise of landscape architecture -of reading a landscape, ‘re – presenting’ it and responding to it articulately. In the first part ‘Reading & Representing’, the studio looked at ways of seeing, recording, and interpreting a place through drawings. It moved on to making a set of constructs that measure and explore the landscape in an interpretative manner. In the second part ‘Imagining & Constructing’ , the students derived a larger idea related to the landscape investigated. Based on their vision, narrative and ‘re- presentation’ of the landscape studied, they attempted to imagine a response to the site. The forest/ the jungle/ the woods: A place that we sense as archaic, primeval; and a space that is deep and dense. Forests are complex, layered and varied in terms of ecology, chronology and the human narratives that describe them. While they can be understood as rational relationships of geography, soil, climate and vegetation, on the other hand they are more than the sum of these parts and have their place deep in the human imagination. We investigated a forest and attempted to look at it from a multi-dimensional perspective and developed many ways of understanding this complex unit. We then attempted to ‘re -present’ it to form a basis for creating a journey through its many ‘natures’ and engaging with it meaningfully.