Site Assembly

Catalog description

This course intends to establish a solid base of technical knowledge about the physical and performative characteristics of traditional building materials and emerging alternatives realted to landscape architecture. In addition, the course encourages students to become astute observers and skilled recorders at the detail to landscape scales, while obtaining a greater materials sensibility to the design and construction processes that eventually translate into built landscapes. This includes the investigation of phenomenal elements and natural processes that take part in the integral relationships established between site assemblies and design intent or material expression. During the course of the semester students will be asked to challenge definitions of material convention, invention, and intervention; through lectures, workshops, discussions, and field trips. Students will examine materials and methods of landscape construction; frameworks for material selection and application; and representations for detail prototyping and construction documentation.