Knowledge:
The studio will provide students with the conceptual categories to address adaptation to climate change in an urbanising regional context through a landscape architectural perspective. The studio will enter design through the scales of hydrology, and enforce the understanding of landscape as infrastructure as well as a mode of perception. Form will be discussed in relation to performance as well as to space and place.

•   Acquaintance of notions of watershed and integrated water management Acquaintance of cultural landscape as a spatial product of geological and climatic forces as well as cultural, political and economical interests and practices layered in time

•   Basic knowledge of landscape as a productive, performative layer in human systems: ecological infrastructure, ecosystem services, and regenerative agriculture

Advanced knowledge of form and urban form: application of landscape ecology’s structural concepts to shape spaces and places; landscape pattern 

Skills:
Students develop skills to envision urban projects as embedded within cultural landscapes with the goal to ensure adaptability to climate change. Research-driven, multi-layered and multi-scalar in its scope, the studio builds the capacity to conduct a layered and visual analysis of the territorial/ regional context, the ability to reference precedents, to fuse technical and aesthetic aspects of form giving, and finally to frame and argue for a well-resolved design proposal anchored within the scale of the territory.

• Research: Capacity to select and sort, and evaluate data from greater information quantities; ability to conduct precedent analysis and transfer
• Analysis: ability to carry out landscape analysis based on map work (GIS and morphological analysis) and field work (photography)
• Strategy: capability to develop scenarios for a watershed, development of propositions related to water flows and cycles for concrete case areas
• Iterative design process: trial and error to find adequate solutions, successive and interrogative usage of drawings, plans, sections, physical and digital models, as well as texts variants, to test and develop proposals, in favour for “unsafe” experimental approaches
• Interrogative design: explicit discussion of a formal question, such as grids, patches, edges, corridors or figures organizing a spatial field
• Design resolution: ability to work out a territorial approach on a detailed level, including grading, planting, surface textures
• Representation: capability to illustrate design through compelling plans, sections, as well as digital and physical models and model photography
• Communication: problem definition, framing of a task within the given context of the studio; skill to verbally and visually argue for a project through telling of a compelling narrative

General competence:
The studio’s underlying thesis will encourage the rethinking of urban and environmental challenges as opportunities to develop place-specific and social spaces for the future. The studio’s main competence goal is to equip students with the ability to to frame their projects in a larger socially and environmentally relevant context, state ideas, translate these into form, and to apply theoretical and technical background in project work, as well as to use the project as an investigative vehicle to address professional and disciplinary questions. Both individual and group work will be trained.