Land Arch Urb: Landscapearchitectureurbanism

3 units

New Disciplinary Dynamics: Blurs and Exchanges. Over the past decade, the various professions engaged in the construction of the built environment have been investigating (both in theory and practice) a specific and deliberate blurring, hybridization, and expansion of the traditional semantic and historical categories of landscape, architecture, and urbanism in an attempt to confront changing situations, environments, and cultures. Across geographical and cultural boundaries, the proliferation of projects (speculative and built) and essays appearing in recent years makes this phenomenon more than a passing trend or the product of individual reflection. Architecture, for example, as a conventional discipline with its own tasks, internal logic, and modus operandi has become so heterogeneous that it can no longer adequately authenticate its products from within the limits of its historical category. The same holds true of the allied fields of landscape and urbanism. Strict disciplinary boundaries are no longer capable of attending to the complexity of contemporary demands produced by mobility, density, de-urbanization, hybrid programs, changing uses, and ecological concerns. The contemporary world forcibly imposes the need for greater flexibility and indeterminacy and for new techniques of practice that are anticipatory, receptive to change, and capable of opening an aperture to the future. This course will explore these disciplinary slippages and hybrid contacts between until now distinct categories through essays and built or speculative works.