LNAK10082U Urbanism Studio

Volume 2016/2017
Education

MSc Programme in Landscape Architecture

Content

This course is an advanced design studio. The studio simulates an architectural office.

A high degree of student involvement and presence will be expected during the studio. All students are expected to attend and take part in the project crits. The studio is to enhance the individual student ability to practice urbanism in a context of an unexpected professional future. The course encourages students to investigate and develop landscape architecture as a multifacetted gaze on urbanism through design interventions on a specific site.

The studio provides the student with the abilities to approach, identify, analyse, prioritise, argue and (re)design an urban situation, e.g. the contemporary city can be understood as a landscape entity. Focus is on how to analyse, conceptualise, question, design and intervene on different scales. Special interest is paid to training how students are able to frame, argue, design and discuss a challenge and their ability to relate this to a site-specific Danish context through a spatial design.

The studio does not restrict the students work to specific theoretical positions or themes. Instead students are asked to position and engage their proposals to theoretical positions. Designs are to be presented, discussed and evaluated in plenum. Through the design intervention the individual student is to learn to take part in the professional debates within urbanism. How can urbanism be studied and investigated as a design solution with roots in the past, an understanding of the present and as an expectation to meet the challenge of the future?

Special focus is paid to discussions of how potential transformation of a site towards new use, new aesthetics and new meaning of the urban can be conceptualized, argued and contested in an landscape architectural design. Students are continually trained in exploring arguments for and against their design intervention.

Learning Outcome

The main aim of the course is to train the students ability to work as landscape architects with the urban.

 

Learning Outcome

 

Knowledge

  • insight into  understanding and framing key aspects of urbanism through the design project work itself

 

Skills

  • structure complicated urbanism challenges into new possible spatial programming and designs which can hold the complexity and contradictions of the urban
  • describe and reflect on related and relevant biological regulating aspects, design interventions and social empowerment

 

Competences

  • academic, professional, artistic, and scientific  understanding of the different aspects and challenges of urban design
  • relational scale awareness about different scales of which different design challenges play out, and how to engage the spatial potentials of the context through an architectural design.
  • communicate, present and argue urban designs that show a new modernity in the relationship between nature and human
Urbanism Studio is graduate design project. By course start the student is expected to have passed as least Byplanstrategi og -projekt or similar courses. Visiting students can enter the course, if they can document for the course responsible that they have passed courses with similar curriculum.

Theories of Urban Design is recommended.
The urban design studio focuses on project work, urban analysis and urban design, mainly done in groups. Priority is given to sketch, design and debate by means of reading, modelling, architectural studies, student presentation and plenum critics. The course lectures are supplemented with guest lectures/critiques.

The studio is seen as a test bed, workshop and a working office in which the role of course responsible are to facilitate a debate on urban design and arguments of interventions among the students – rather than dictate answers on how and on how not to design in urbanism. Nobody will know the final outcome of the studio, of urbanism.

The teaching methods applied include scientific and artistic methods as well as techniques for sketching and presentation. Special emphasis is put on sketching by doing film experiments, diagrams, models, as well as sketching done on tracing paper, in debates and in texts. The theory of education is that the learning and designing is done in combination of individual and group work. Central in the learning proces is the dialog with tutors and fellow students around the drawing board and presentations, where fellow students and tutors comment and give constructive criticism.

Reading of selected chapters and essays in the literature will form the basis for informal debate sessions and is to provide different perspectices on the studio production. In addition there will be held lectures and introductions by guests and supervisors. Throughout the course a plenum session of presentation, debate and evaluation is scheduled, ideally, once a week.

A study trip is offered as an option to explore urbanism in a different context and configuration.
Students will work with different medias. Why familiarity with modelmaking, the adobe photoshop, illustrator and indesign plus CAD, Rhino or similar programmes will be of advance for the student to express him/herself spatially and graphically and take part of group work.
  • Category
  • Hours
  • Exam
  • 20
  • Excursions
  • 20
  • Guidance
  • 40
  • Lectures
  • 20
  • Preparation
  • 20
  • Project work
  • 292
  • Total
  • 412
Credit
15 ECTS
Type of assessment
Oral examination, 20 min
Written assignment
Hand-in of Group project (Posters and models) and A3 catalogue, followed by 20 minutes oral examination. The oral examination consists of a group presentation and a 10 minutes individual oral examination.
Aid
All aids allowed
Marking scale
passed/not passed
Censorship form
External censorship
Re-exam

Re-submission of Group project (Posters and models) and A3 catalogue followed by 20 minutes oral examination.

Criteria for exam assesment

See learning outcome