Landscape Foundation Studio : Decoding the Forest

The studio begins with a fundamental premise of landscape architecture: reading & representing a landscape and responding to it articulately. In the first part ‘Reading & Representing’, the studio looked at ways of seeing, recording, and decoding a place through drawings. It proceeded to make 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 they investigated. Based on their vision, narrative and representation of the landscape studied, they attempted to imagine a response to the site. The studio brief is as follows: One Forest The forest/ the jungle/ the woods: A place that we sense as archaic, primeval; a space that is deep & dense. Forests are complex, layered and varied in terms of ecology, chronology & the human narratives that describe them. While they can be understood as rational relationships of geography, soil, climate, and vegetation they are also 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 to develop many ways of understanding this complex unit and then imagined a response to its many natures that allows a meaningful engagement with it."