UTSOA

As a response to globalization, shifts between the contemporary city's social, political, economic, and ecological systems have established landscape as an active agent of urbanization, whereby natural processes are integrated with regional infrastructure and metropolitan expansion. In this manner, the medium of landscape has been recalibrated to that of an adaptive framework, such that the large scale management of systems and program has often been privileged at the expense of human experience, scale, and spatial articulation.

Seeking to realign landscape agency with the capability to alter an environment phenomenally, this studio will examine the implementation of an urban landscape through the lens of material and detail. Eschewing a pre-defined program, research into sensory cognition and a pre-selected list of high performance materials will be used to generate scenarios/ interventions for speculative sites within Austin's interstitial spaces and vacant lots. Specifically, a material's properties or performance characteristics will be channeled into a site's available phenomena in order to elicit visual, aural, tactile, or olfactory response.

Participants in the studio will be asked to engage landscape at the level of material in order to provide form at the human scale of the city. As such, mapping and research are to be the interfaced with the conceptual and technical development of program, construction, and site. In this manner, the reciprocal influence that exists between the landscape medium and an individual's sensory input suggests the means by which a material practice can inform the perception of place.