ON SITE: Landscape Architectonic Explorations

On Site, organized by the section of Landscape Architecture explores how locally sourced materials can be reconfigured into resilient, dynamic, landscape structures that engage geologic, hydrological, and biological systems, enabling new topologies to unfold over time. We aim at participants with different disciplinary backgrounds. Students are challenged to review their ways of spatial exploration and diagnosis and to develop a deep understanding of the qualities of the existing landscape.

The aim of the course is to explore the potential of site-specific landscape structures that go beyond normative performances and allow for alternative and surprising uses and meaning. The task for the designer is to make these structures accessible, mentally, visually and physically, by means of experiment and intervention, and transform them into site-specific, dynamic, and evolving landscapes.

Advanced digital surveying, design and fabrication technologies serve as key tools in this exploration. Students will conduct detailed sensing and modelling of the site’s material and hydrological conditions, using this data to develop material strategies that respect local resources and processes. Material transformation techniques—such as clay ripening, texture sorting, or earthmoving—will be applied to align material behavior with ecological and aesthetic intentions.

The course culminates in a built demonstrator that acts both as a prototype and a speculative model for how landscape architecture can merge technological mediation with ecological intelligence and resilience. Hands-on landscape engineering and construction work is part of the course, as well as interacting with the stakeholders and the public.

- Exhibition of situational encounters (30%)

- Conceptual design of landscape transformation (30%)

- On site physical intervention (40%)

The project is awarded a grade that is a whole or half number between 1.0 and 10.0. Students pass the course with a 6.0 or higher. With a grade below 6.0: students who presented assessable work during the course are allowed to do a repair to change the grade into a ‘pass’. The repair is unsupervised and needs to be completed within two weeks after the end of the course. For students with a grade below 5.0 a repair is not advised, because the chance of success is low.

When the repair is unsuccessful, the student needs to follow the entire course again. In this case we offer students the opportunity to retake the course during the summer period to avoid substantial delay in the study, since the Landscape Architecture track offers all courses of MSc1 and MSc2 only once per year. The student needs to contact the course coordinator in June to start planning for tutoring during the summer break.