Pan Scroll Zoom

In 2020 Luis Callejas, Gro Bonesmo and Mattias Josefsson  led the course “The Forest” in collaboration with Yale School of Architecture as part of the Louis Kahn professorship. This course was carried out during the pandemic, with a combination of architecture and landscape architecture students. Luis was commissioned to write an essay for the book Pan Scroll Zoom, titled “The forest clearing archetype” which is published along a selection of student works.
 
«In this book they invite 20 studios from different parts of the world to expose pedagogical models that had to adapt to online teaching. It is about the evolving role of drawing and representation. For us this was also an opportunity to test the idea that landscapes and buildings can be designed by creatively working with detailed surveys, such as the rich lidar data on forests available in Norway. The students at AHO in Oslo could visit the forest, while the students at Yale could only engage with it through the lidar surveys we edited for them.

It was an opportunity to see the difference between results by students that can visit a site versus the ones that couldn’t. It was an experiment on challenging the myth of direct experience, but more importantly, it was also about the poetics and design potential embedded in these new surveys. To explore this, we have to treat the drawing as site, which can sometimes be only done by entirely skipping traditional site visits» says Callejas. 
 
Read more about the book here.