LandBasics_Climate and Environment Crisis Studio
The premise of the studio is that the landscape architect is a key figure in addressing critical spatial issues of the times. The studio implements a research-based approach to design, beginning with formulating an issue and continuing through multidimensional mapping of the issue’s spatial expressions in the landscape, and holding a critical discourse on how the space is actually created in practice. In this way, students identify new areas in which to work.
This year, final projects in landscape architecture dealt with spatial phenomena related to climate change and the environmental crisis, ongoing development and crowding in the Israeli space, and geopolitical and ethno-national challenges. Together, we focused on local and regional aspects of the global crisis, and ways in which landscape architects must address and try to overcome the challenges that are unfolding before our eyes. We asked questions such as:
- What are the roles of urban spaces and landscapes, and how are they designed and planned?
- How might open spaces mitigate expected negative impacts, and play an important role in restoring ecosystems?
- How are certain technological developments relevant to the processes of planning, designing, and representing the landscape?
- What are sustainable and beneficial living environments?
- Which aspects of landscape architecture can be perfected, developed, enhanced, and/or replicated for other fields?
Scenarios regarding the future require a new reading of spaces, prioritization, and developing a set of actions outside the existing hierarchies and worldviews that led us into the current situation. The goal is to create multi-functional living environments, which link the experiential with the poetic, the ecological with the environmental, and the social with the political.
