'Landscape Mirror' & 'Feed the Wind': Teaching Landscape Architecture on Site at Oerol Festival in the Wadden Sea

'Landscape Mirror' & 'Feed the Wind': Teaching Landscape Architecture on Site at Oerol Festival in the Wadden Sea

Jauslin, D.T.
Bobbink, I.

Architecture

Urbanism

2012-09-05

In the projects 'Landscape Mirror' 2011 and 'Feed the Wind' 2012 students of the Master of Landscape Architecture of the TU Delft have made an interactive project that evolved over the course of Oerol, a unique yearly recurring festival on the Wadden-Sea island Terschelling for landscape theatre & art. Both designs are focused on making people aware of the landscape of the island. In 2011 the 10-day installation mirrored from the highest dune all different landscapes of the island -beach, dunes, forest, city and polder- onto the beach. A camera obscura, situated on the top of the dune, gave the opportunity to see the real as well as the mirrored landscape at once. Visitors first experienced the landscape through the eye of the camera before walking themselves into the area depicted there. Besides experiencing the spatial qualities of the island in the installation, the public could influence the space itself by building parts of the forest and preventing the city from flooding by improving the dikes of the polder. In 2012 visitors of the festival gained awareness of constant changes in the landscape on a much smaller scale: a garden. Geological changes were simulated. One project entitled 'Feed the Wind' demonstrated how the wind as a natural force shaped the land, and how man used this power to modify the island. In a garden designed and built by the students, visitors were asked to bring sand and fill it into an assemblage of foot pumps and bridges. Slowly the making of the Wadden Sea began. The project lasted 10 days. The unpredictability of the design and building process and the fact that the final result of the exhibition is not fully determined by the design make these installations valuable experiments. For our students building something, working in a team and the experience of the interaction with visitors during the construction was a totally new and rewarding experience. Unforeseen problems had to be dealt with directly instead of thinking about possible future scenarios on a drawing table. The Delft Chair of Landscape Architecture are happy to continue this experience next year, if funding and artistic programming of the festival will allow it. In the paper we would like to present this outstanding element of our curriculum as a very fruitful way of education. Our wish is to test our teaching through the exchange of ideas with colleagues in practice and education and to encourage others to similar experiences.

Landscape Architecture
Design Education
Design Build Project
Land Art
Heritage Landscapes

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:68d99e45-6c10-4283-b3bb-0dd9496699d4

IFLA

2012-09-11

49th IFLA World Congress "Landscapes in transition", Cape Town, South Africa, 5-7 September 2012

Institutional Repository

conference paper

(c) 2012 Jauslin, D.T.
Bobbink, I.