Basic
Assignment 01: Hybrid Plan
Construct a large-scale orthographic base map and then zoom in to produce a detail plan showing an engineered object (or set of engineered objects) within a larger landscape. Students will learn fundamental operations in AutoCAD, Photoshop, and Illustrator.
Assignment 02: Section-Elevation
Construct a section-elevation through an engineered object, delineating its tectonics and surrounding landscape conditions, such as geology, hydrology, soils, vegetation, and other constructed landscape objects. Students will continue to explore AutoCAD, Illustrator, and Photoshop, focusing on lineweights, collage techniques, and scale.
Assignment 03: Perspective
Construct a perspective drawing which illuminates the experience of inhabiting, passing through, observing, or working within the restoration project site selected for study. The location depicted within the restoration project site may be freely chosen, but should be selected for its relevance in explaining the restoration project as a landscape, particularly when considered in relationship to the plan and section-elevation drawings from Assignments 01 and 02.
Assignment 04: Cartography
Beginning with the large-scale orthographic base map produced in Assignment 01, construct a map showing topographic, hydrological, urban, infrastructural, and ecological conditions within the full extent of the area affected by the study restoration project. Students will learn basic operations in ArcGIS and continue to explore Illustrator and Photoshop.
Assignment 05: Notation
Working with the drawings produced in the previous assignments as base material, construct a drawing annotated to explain the movement of material through the study territory in both space and time.
Intermediate
Assignment 01: Network Plan
Produce a particular kind of orthographic plan for your study territories, focused on establishing first objects, fields, corridors and borders of significance and second networks of relations between those objects and fields as defined by exchanges of matter and energy, modulated by borders and transmitted along corridors. In other words: metabolism, spatialized.
Assignment 02: Axonometric
Produce a large-scale axonometric representation of your study landscape by constructing a terrain model, place one or more constructed landscape objects into that terrain model, adding materials to both terrain model and landscape objects, and, finally, exploding and annotating the axonometric as appropriate in order to explain tectonic, scalar, and functional relationships within the study landscape.
Assignment 03: Storyboard
Produce a storyboard that uses sequential movement through the space of the model that you have constructed for your axonometric drawing in order to produce a narrative reading of some aspect of the study landscape.
Assignment 04: Systems Section-Perspective
Using the terrain model constructed in earlier assignments as a base, produce a section-perspective cut through the study landscape and annotated to describe the function of a relevant site system, such as hydrology or sedimentary flows.
Assignment 05: Animation & Atmosphere
Use the native animation and simulation capacities of 3ds Max to represent motion through space and the passage of time within the study landscape.
Advanced
Proposal Instructions
Develop a substantive and challenging plan of study for the semester. Your work must explore the capacity of digital representation to serve a generative role in the design process — that is, to participate in the development of a landscape design, and not serve merely as a tool for the illustration of a completed concept. You are encouraged to explore hybrid workflows, moving between various digital tools to exploit varying capacities and even working between analog and digital media.