ARCH492 LANDSCAPE RESEARCH II
| Course Code: | 1200492 |
| METU Credit (Theoretical-Laboratory hours/week): | 3 (3.00 - 0.00) |
| ECTS Credit: | 4.0 |
| Department: | Architecture |
| Language of Instruction: | English |
| Level of Study: | Undergraduate |
| Course Coordinator: | Lecturer ERKİN AYTAÇ |
| Offered Semester: | Fall Semesters. |
Course Objectives
In the past two decades, the subject of landscape went under a fertile interrogation within design culture. This laid the latent capacity of the field to embrace a wide array of issues of the urban milieu bare. Among these, the field’s promise in addressing matters of infrastructure is remarkable. This is a radical challenge into infrastructure’s earlier preconception as a closed subject matter of engineering. Such a confrontation opens the round table for discussions around the nature of contemporary urbanization which renders systems of production and those of consumption remote. Injecting into this ground, this course dwells on systems of food – patterns of production, distribution, consumption and disposal. Touching upon issues ranging from gastronomic traditions to emergent food cultures, from (bio)politics to health, it aims to picture the breadth of the issue making room for (your) in-depth scrutiny into specific spatially momentous dimensions of the theme.
Course Content
The course is composed of a series of lectures and research period. Lecture series are assembled under two headings: On Landscape and Expanded Field of Landscape. First module of the course, On Landscape, elaborates the meaning, language and milieu of landscape on a conceptual basis. This part ends up with students presentation on a selected article from the assigned reading list on landscape. The second module, Expanded Field of Landscape, discusses the inspiring and generative interplay between landscape and art, architecture, urbanism. The knowledge gained from both modules will be reflected through a landscape excursion which is required to be documented through a critical narration.
Course Learning Outcomes
Three ambitions guide our course curriculum
1. To develop a holistic understanding of Landscape’s myriad of meanings
2. To treat the urban in Landscape terms
3. To practice topic-based research
Course Process: Three challenges and Three Concepts
Landscape research puts up analytic, synthetic and representational challenges. The following items set forth, in brief form, the process you will follow to meet these challenges throughout the course. It also introduces three landscape concepts central to our process.
- The concept of unbound site prompts considering not solely the territories under direct control, but the more extensive physical, social and temporal arenas impacted by actions.
- The concept of infrastructural inversion emphasizes the ecological, social, cultural and political agenda over the technical and technological, the organic over the rational, reminding that infrastructure’s operation within ecological complexities cannot be reduced to measures of its functional utility and efficiency.
- The concept of territorial time invokes the complexity of ever-shifting dynamics of fixed territories that involve physical and non-physical systems that designers must consider in their thinking.