Edge-scapes; An enquiry into coastal edges, design process & landscape architecture practice.

As the landscape architecture discipline grapples with the immense challenges of our anthropocenic world, it concerns itself with the solving of extremely complex environmental, climatic, socio-political-economical and cultural challenges that blanket the concept of landscapes. Responding to this, landscape architecture pedagogy, academia and parts of practice have turned to systems design, ‘instrumentality’, quantities and data with a focus on large-scale strategy and planning. While this might be a necessary step in engaging with our world’s ever-present issues, it is problematic if this is at the expense of important other realms of landscape design. Fundamental to landscape design is our ability to articulate landscape spaces for human use and experience and that the discipline acknowledges that central to this placemaking is how to engage with the uniqueness of the pre-existing landscape. What it struggles to conceptualise, however, is the nature of this uniqueness and this points to a need for further interrogation of practice. This research proposes that the relationship between the human body and its environment is central to this and that an embrace of affect is the way to re-think and re-orient design practice in way that will allow it to engage with uniqueness and in a manner suited to the complex and perplexing demands of the current era.

1. How can the landscape designer experiment with the complex experience of a coastal edge?

2. How can landscape architecture experiment rigorously with the pre-existing landscape?