Lock in with BA (Hons) Landscape Architecture

Get creative 

Measure yourself or someone you live with standing, walking and sitting to create a series of simple ergonomic charts of human proportions and movement.

Watch

Every film has a landscape, so take notes and snapshots from films you watch. Here are some that deal directly with interesting debates in landscape architecture – like, character and memory: 

• The Illusionist, Sylvain Chomet
• Globalism and Urbanisation, Urbanized
• Gary Hustwit or human life in space, The Human Scale 
• Andreas Dalsgaard, Final Cut for Real

Capture

Document a digital flip book of photos that inspire you, environments, or compositions of hard materials or plants you walk past on a journey you travel on frequently. Explore themes like contrast - this could be literal things like light and dark, or it could be conceptual like an emotional response.

Practise sketching and drawing

Try to capture landscapes that you have explored and have improved your life within lockdown, the more elaborate and bizarre the better. You can look at different ways to draw things, small or large things, spaces or objects. Perhaps look to record the increased details from landscape experiences that you may not have explored before this strange situation. Have a look at this book to start with Wilk, S. 2014, Drawing for Landscape Architects, DOM, Berlin.

Read and research

Look and read around the subject, look at differences of opinion. Look at example projects and consider how attitudes differ from your own, those of different places and different cultures. You might want to try writing about the things you feel strongly about, and this could be in the form of a short story, essay or perhaps a blog that you can add to. Explore example landscape projects such as at  Landezine, Landscape Institute  or Project for Public Spaces. 

Model

Create a conceptual model using scrap or bought materials to explore an interesting theme. Either pick a theme, or just open a book/magazine at any page and pick one word from the first paragraph.

Map

Create a map of a short journey you take to describe the lighting, textures, smells, sounds or materials you experience on the way. This can be digital or analogue, two dimensional or three dimensional, but the focus should be on the sensory experience (not the route). 

Listen to

• The Landscape Architecture Podcast
• Placemakers

Connect with us

@landscape_birminghamcityuni