Landscape Futures : Field Interventions July 2, 2013

End of one academic year and headlong into the next……and the next one’s going to be a biggie.

The new Masters in Architecture course commences.  I’ll be teaching one of the design ateliers with Prof. Karim Hadjri and we’ve been busy working it all out.  So, now presenting in glorious RGB Technicolour……

Landscape Futures : Field Interventions

Landscape Futures Super-Workshop, Rina Kukaj

It’s an opportunity to expand our role and understanding of landscape within the architectural discipline as well as getting serious about the skills and knowledge we need to secure a sustainable urbanism and contextual architectural intervention.  We’re still working out the finer points, but here’s a taster of what’s to come….

“How can architecture engage with concepts of food scarcity and energy security in the context of increasing urbanisation and rural decline?

How can technology engage with landscape to define an architecture of the future?

How do issues of infrastructure and aesthetics combine to produce sustainable urban futures that respond to ‘place’ and ‘time’?

The Landscape Futures atelier commences with a rapid-fire series of projects which investigate the flow and stasis of elements which define and determine urban and rural metabolisms including food, energy, biodiversity and transport. These issues will be explored at global and local levels and communicated in a variety of visual and tactile forms.

Semester 1 continues with exploration of precedents in the Netherlands and the north-west of England  to establish temporal, spatial and aesthetic solutions and emerging challenges for architecture, focusing on the connectivity and symbiosis of urban existence with rural and agrarian productivity.  This research will be used to generate strategies for a new and plausible urbanism for the Lancashire region based upon a deep understanding of how landscape and place interact with and determine architectural interventions in spaces of uncertain futures.

West8 Shell Project,
Eastern Scheldt Storm Surge Barrier, Zeeland

“We are never going to save the rural places or the agricultural places or the wild and scenic places (or the wild species that dwell there) unless we identify the human habitat and then strive to make it so good that humans will voluntarily inhabit it.”
James Howard Kunstler

If you are interested in studying on the MArch at UCLan and joining us in this atelier or if you have any questions, please feel free to email me or use the form below.

I would also be really keen to hear from those interested in contributing to the atelier, either as a guest tutor, keynote speaker or as a case study.