11179 Landscape Urbanism

Description

In this subject, students are introduced to contemporary issues, preoccupations and approaches within recent landscape architecture beginning with landscape urbanism. The subject examines the often self-conscious construction of 'the contemporary' as a space of discourse, design production, and intellectual controversy within landscape architecture (and its overlaps with architecture). This subject emphasises the key role of representation – experimental and generative drawing, mapping, and diagramming – as well as postmodern theory on the reinvigoration and intensification of landscape architectural production, as well as the increased attention being paid to landscape architecture by architects. In exploring these themes, the subject also folds backwards to trace various relevant representational histories, from Humphry Repton's Red Books, the use of Claude glasses, perspective grids and camera obscuras, and their role in shaping landscape sensibilities (and considers why these technical objects have become subjects themselves of recent scholarly preoccupation). The subject also considers the influence of more recent art traditions imported from modernism, land art, minimalism and the Situationists, and concludes with an examination of current fixations with infrastructure, logistics, ecology, other large and complex territorial and planetary systems, remote sensing and other technological developments, and the Anthropocene, along with the influence of the environmental humanities. It traces these various influences within defining texts, drawings, and projects, both built and unbuilt. The subject also considers Australian landscapes and landscape design, and the complex status of the national versus the transnational in contemporary landscape architectural culture; while at the same time maintaining a critical lens fixed on canonical landscape history, categories and periodisations.

Typical availability

Spring session, City campus