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Design Studio 5 explores landscape as a continually unfolding process, where the permanence of environments is challenged and their states of equilibrium shifted. Our temporal engagement with landscape is short term, but its effects are long lasting. We can disrupt, augment or alter existing processes or catalyse new ones which may unearth the past, affect the present or suggest new futures.
The starting point for this year’s studies was the ‘ground plane’; both a notion and a physical construct, this defines the role of addition or subtraction from an existing mass or body. The processes we are interested in affect this line, forcing the balance between ‘above’ and ‘below’ off kilter. The interrelationship of supposedly natural and artificial processes has been irreversibly shifted. We have explored the extent of this change and its effects on the ground plane, and unearthed new landscape futures derived from shifted datums. Preconceptions regarding reductive processes or methods of removal have been challenged by additive or positive methods of engaging with the land. By questioning whether moments of historical removal could be remedied by contemporary deposition, we explored the potential of new landscapes set into the pre-existing geological, political and cultural cycles of the ground plane.
Term one started along the foreshore of the River Thames, a site whose complex history has involved a myriad of processes which have brought it to its present state. In-situ surveys, drawings and physical studies examined past, present and future processes of addition and subtraction. Students then developed their observations and research into propositional designs, which were both physically and conceptually born out of reflections on processes of change.
In term two we ventured along the Jurassic Coast, from stone quarries carved out of the earth, to ever-changing landscapes shrouded in complex conservation, ownership and preservation challenges. Our preliminary tests into additive and subtractive processes were set against research agendas and explored through sites chosen during the field trip. Projects explored notions of collection, preservation, museumification and landscape archival, balanced with the growing need for sustainable systems of landscape use.