This book is about the first ten years of the master track in Landscape Architecture at the Department of Urbanism in the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment at TU Delft. It delves into the personal, educational, didactical, organizational and, above all, substantive dimensions of the teaching of this appealing and highly relevant discipline at the academic level. The book has three parts. The first part – PROFILE – discusses the context and events that led up to the development of the master track and influenced its further development – from the very first landscape architecture related appointments and initiatives in the 1940s to the first day in September 2010 when the programme began with seven participants, and on to the celebration of its tenth anniversary in 2021. Infographics show the numbers and profiles of the student population and illustrate the structure of the master curriculum. The second section – WORK – contains snapshots of drawings, photos, collages and other graphic material produced by our students. The images are loosely grouped according to the five stages in the design process: exploring, understanding, conceptualizing, modifying and engineering the landscape. Interspersed with this kaleidoscopic variety of images you will find a series of short essays on key topics in landscape architecture education written by the present staff of the Landscape Architecture section. Finally, at the end of the book you will find a few lists – PEOPLE – of all those involved: students, staff and guest lecturers. They are the ones who made and still make the master track such a wonderful community to belong to.

Rapid urbanization and increasing globalization of urban development strategies are resulting in a lack of connection between people and places, and places and their context. Nevertheless, cultural embedding and sense of place have a direct impact on the quality of public space. The purpose of this research is to explore culture and context specific design strategies that enable the production of situated meaning , in turn augmenting the quality of public space. First, an extended framework for the evaluation of public space quality is presented, incorporating Gehl’s Twelve Quality Criteria, as well as aspects from Stobbelaar and Pedroli’s Landscape Identity Circle. Subsequently, three case studies by West 8, located in culturally and spatially diverse contexts and are evaluated against this framework. As a result from this analysis, symbolic ornamentation appears as West 8’s primary design strategy to embed these projects into their cultural and spatial contexts. With the term symbolic ornamentation, we refer to the abstraction of elements from the landscape – history, ecology or culture related – into design elements as a way to incorporate them within a design project. To this, the office deploys three specific strategies: analysis as a parallel and iterative process through the various phases of design, engagement of native collaborators and craftsmanship for local know-how and the facilitation of public participation for various purposes during the design process. The research concludes that cultural meaning is not independent of affordance and that functionality in a project can also evoke a sense of place through appropriate design strategies.

Belonging to the small-scale and private sphere, gardens are usually omitted from urban and regional landscape plans. Yet, we argue that the assemblage of everyday gardens – the garden complex – is an inherent component of the landscape metropolis that holds the potential to become a powerful landscape agency. This potential is enclosed, among others, within three particular qualities: hybridity, scalar paradoxes, and complex dynamics. Practicing these qualities as concepts for landscape design and analysis helps to expand the imaginaries of everyday gardens to more purposefully reflect and negotiate the condition of the landscape metropolis. By means of two case studies – two domestic gardens – we demonstrate that designing with hybridity entails versatility, simultaneity, and multiplicity, thereby engendering a richness of meaning and experiences. This pluralism is also inherent in the scalar paradoxes we observed. Cross-scalar interactions evoke design implications that transcend the confines of the private plot, surpassing individual, human gain, and making individual gardens enter into dialogue with each other and with their surroundings. Lastly, by working with an enlarged set of complex dynamics, the two case studies prove that a garden can be a driver of change and innovation, and thereby a valuable source of resilience.

Innovation in mapping methods for historical landscape research is flourishing,
largely because this type of research is situated at the very fertile intersection of
ongoing technological development and sustained critical reflection. On the one
hand, the development of digital tools for data capturing, data analysis and data
structuring has revolutionised our ability to extract and plot out data of all sorts
and to combine, mix and re-mix these data in order to discover spatio-temporal
relationships that have previously remained hidden. On the other hand, the
humanities’ sustained interest in spatiality as well as its growing involvement with the new digital tools make for a continuous critical reflection accompanied by ongoing methodological experiments that stretch, morph and bend these digital tools in order for them to reflect context and source specificity, to include different theoretical perspectives on landscape, to enable narrative formats, etc.

Exhibition Matera Cultural Capital of Europe, Matera IT