Start semester
60 517 Islands: Images of many natures
1. Intermediate to advanced Rhino 3d skills.
2. Adobe suite (Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere and Indesign)
3. Some fundamentals about garden history are desirable but not required, particularly for architecture students. (Previous to the course it is recommended to read through "The Course of Landscape Architecture: A History of our Designs on the Natural World" by Christophe Girot ISBN-13: 978-0500342978)
4. Refined visual education and aesthetic sensitivity
5. Interest or curiosity about the intersection of architecture and landscape architecture.
6. Architecture students interested in design with live matter.
7. Landscape architecture students with interest in objects and form.
8. Basic GIS is highly desired but not required.
Oslo:
Open to Landscape architecture and architecture students.
Instructors: Luis Callejas and Mattias Josefson
Introductory workshop with Fadi Masoud and Alan Berger (August 14 - 21)
Mid semester workshop with Kai Reaver (October 2 - 9)
Number of students: 15
Tromsø
Third-semester Landscape Architecture students
Instructors: Kjerstin Uhre and Biljana Nikolic
Introductory workshop with Biljana Nikolic (August 14 - 21)
As a geographic trope for designers the island represents at the same time total freedom and total constraint. When used as a metaphor to describe landscape conditions, it seemingly contradicts current environmental discourses that tend to advocate for relentless interconnection between natural systems. The island often describes bounded or framed nature, thriving or evolving due to conditions that often would be deemed undesirable in the mainland.
The island beyond the metaphor, when understood simply as bounded space, can also be used to re-vitalise the seemingly obsolete idea of the contained garden, particularly at territorial scales, a space where freedom and extreme beauty primes over ecologic performance.
When represented as physical frame rather than a metaphor, the island is the ideal laboratory to break the current conflict between beauty and ecologic performance; or more specific to designers: the conflict between fixed form and design with and for natural systems.
An island can be considered a small model of the world, in many ways not that different than the idea of an enclosed garden, a space of fantasy and simulation where what happens within the restricted boundaries of the island can not, and perhaps should not happen in the mainland.
Taking example of previous real and fictional gone-wrong experiments (like Invasive beautiful species in Australia, or the failure of the Jurassic park (2) we will drag and drop objects and living things, track their interactions and hopefully create beautiful and perhaps even perverse contained ecologies. The studio is equally interested in figures like Dr. Moreau (3), or the mastermind in Jurassic park, as in figures like O M Ungers and other architects that have already employed the island as a metaphor for curated exclusion when designing for cities.
The studio will deal with the islands as living confined laboratory rather than a metaphor useful for architects concerned with objects or monuments in abstract space.
The course will embrace the pelagic space of Norway and confront the students with the task of designing large objects and a contained ecology within the geographic constraints of an island condition.
We will operate along the full north - south coast, from Finnmark to Østfold, while each student will have a different island or group of small islands as a digital laboratory of form vs designed ecologies.
Students will research and explore the tropes of the readymade in art as well as past land art practices focused on large objects, also the wildest representations of contained nature and gardens in contemporary painting and contemporary environmental art.
We will explore the possibility of translating these methods into the realm of constructed ecologies by borrowing material from designers, digital artists and video game developers that have already created extensive libraries of autonomous models of animals, plants, unnatural creatures and climatic events. Results will give priority to aesthetic qualities over ecologic performance.
By taking the islands out of the ecologic contexts beyond the coast, designers will also be free to propose large objects and test their impact against disperse fields of creatures and plant material borrowed from digital libraries; all while testing the interactions with their primitive pre designed ecologies and behaviours.
Potential Sites:
(list to be expanded)
Giske
Tamsøya
Leka
Jøa
Vågsøy
Andøya
Husøya
Ålesund
Alden
Bulandet
Melkøya
Karlsøy
Bjarkøy
Røst
Træna
Vega
Dønna
Hitra
Sotra
Utsira
Veierland
Bastøy
Nesøya
Selja
Tromsøya
Arnøya
1. Students will learn to design with live matter without loosing the capacity to design objects.
2. Students will learn that objectifying nature can be compatible with ecological performance.
3. Students will engage in playful yet serious experiments on how form interacts with fluid mediums like live matter, water and climate. Not for the sake of pure performance but rather seeking refined aesthetic effects.
4. Students will learn basic use of video game software for ecological simulation as a counterpoint and perhaps direct critique to the use of parametric software often focused in geometry.
Methodology
The legacy of land art, particularly in North America includes a generation of artist mostly working with mineral landscape media that created large-scale installations of striking yet delicate impact. (5)
Currently, there is an active critique in architecture and landscape architecture discourses that seemingly rejects the value and ethics of artistic practices focused on large-scale interventions in both landscape and urbanistic projects. The critiques are often justified by exposing the lack of capacity of certain interventions to go beyond the visual, incapable to meaningfully influence an ecology or produce works that behave as an ecology in their own. (6)
The studio will re-invigorate the relevance or large scale artistic interventions based on objects and live matter, claiming that the field can be renewed by taking advantage of simulation technologies not available to previous generation of land artists, landscape architects and architects.
Programming the interventions is to some extent optional, in case there is a specific program it should be capable to relate to the ecology of the island either as a building for experimentation with live matter or a space for scientific display within the garden.
For the context of the studio, each island will behave as a large experimental garden, deliberately free from the ecologic contexts and complexities of the mainland. Objects, buildings, and live matter will be inserted following principles of composition confronted with topography, while their interactions with creatures and artificial climate tracked, observed and presented as large-scale artworks of their own.
The studio will be as much about form and objects, as it will be about the interaction between form and environment. The contained limits of the islands will keep experiments controlled and hopefully derive in a contained form of environmental determinism.
Interpretation and judgment of results will assume projects exist beyond the traditional definitions of large scale artworks, gardens or buildings.
Techniques
The studio will work with 3d models of selected islands and half way through the studio will continue the development within a virtual space in UNITY 3d (6). There will be a two-week workshop led by AHO Instructor Kai Reaver to get into the tools and context of the software, also to understand its possibilities beyond the realm of video game design and representation.
After the workshop students will be asked to simulate and ecology within each island, species, and objects will be able to interact with rules defined by each designer or pre-established by the developers of each animal or climatic model.
Landscape architects and architects will be able to extend their design palette to storms, manipulate gravity, flocks of animals and design unnatural ecologies. With more freedom comes more responsibility as ultimately each island will reflect each designer’s position towards ecology, conservation, and environment. Students will be able to choose to assign more responsibility to objects or animated live matter.
Ultimately the studio is also an experiment to test the relevance and potential of ecological simulation derived from video game software beyond static representation. This software and virtual space will create a climate ideal for students skeptic about the apparent divergence or art and science in recent landscape architecture discourses.
Preliminary schedule
Stage I
Workshop with Fadi Masoud and Alan Berger
(August 14 - 21)
Stage II
Field trip Norway: Visit to islands in the north of Norway (3 days)
Launching the studio together with Tromsø students. Lectures by Luis Callejas and Kai Reaver
Research, data collection and island theory.
Students will be immersed in the extensive writings and production of artistic / architectural practices that have deal with the island as metaphor and space of investigation. Movies, texts and theories will be explored under non hierarchical scrutiny.
Stage II
Modelling. Gathering GIS and 3d data. Assigning islands to each student.
Island stories: Getting familiar with each island’s pre existing conditions.
Preliminary proposals.
Stage III
Unity 3d
1 Week workshop with Kai Reaver.
Stage IV
Field trip Sardinia
Stage V
The design of an island ecology: From Gardens to objects to fields
Stage VII
Final exhibition. Oslo and Tromsø
References:
Islands and atolls, Pamphlet Architecture 33. Luis Callejas
http://www.papress.com/html/product.details.dna?isbn=9781616891428
Florian Hertweck (Editor), Sebastien Marot (Editor) Oswald Mathias Ungers Berlin Green Archipelago
https://www.amazon.com/City-Berlin-Green-Archipelago/dp/3037783265
In: New Geographies, vol. 8: Island. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Graduate School of Design:
“Philosopher´s Island” Robert Mackay
“Molten Entities” Timothy Morton with artworks by Olafur Eliasson
“On seeing and believing: Islands of chaos and the key questions of scientific visualisation” Nina Samuel
“A stroll between fields and objects” A conversation with Stan Allen
“On the limits of process” Anita Berrizbeitia
“The limits of limits: Schmitt, Aureli and the geopolitical ontology of the island” Douglas Spencer
“Gardens as migratory devices” Kees Lokman
“The island effect: Reality of metaphor” Stefania Staniscia.
“Desert Island: An atlas of archipelagic laboratories” MAP office
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9781934510452
| Form of assessment | Grouping | Grading scale | Comment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Project assignment | Individual | Pass / fail | Final presentation |
| Workload activity | Comment |
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| Evaluation (mid term) |