Landscape & Imagination

Abstract

Landscape & Imagination approaches imagination as a situated, embodied and relational practice that precedes and conditions territorial design. Rather than treating imagination as a tool for generating ideas or projecting futures, the course focuses on practices of presence and attentiveness.

Objective

By the end of the course, students will be able to: _Reframe imagination as a situated practice of presence rather than a cognitive or representational tool. _Develop familiarity with theoretical approaches to landscape-bound affect, atmosphere and existential presence. _Cultivate perceptual and atmospheric attunement to landscape situations marked by ecological, historical and more-than-human complexity. _Experiment with conceptual, material and performative forms of articulation that remain responsive to what exceeds representation. _Prepare the ground for appropriate and responsible design action by conditioning perceptual, ethical and imaginative dispositions.

Content

Landscape & Imagination is a graduate-level course that repositions imagination from a cognitive or representational capacity to a situated, landscape-oriented practice of presence. Rather than treating imagination as a mental faculty used to generate ideas, concepts or narratives, the course approaches imagination as a mode of participatory engagement through which landscapes may appear, exert agency, and enter into relation with those who inhabit and transform them. The course departs from the observation that contemporary landscape and territorial design increasingly operates within conditions of ecological precarity, historical sedimentation and more-than-human entanglement. In such contexts, conventional representational and problem-solving approaches risk overwriting precisely those dimensions of landscape that matter most: atmospheric qualities, affective residues, temporal depth, and forms of presence that are not immediately legible or discursively articulated. The course therefore does not aim to produce design concepts or solutions, but to condition the perceptual, ethical and imaginative ground from which responsible design action may emerge. Imagination is understood here as a practice: a set of cultivated dispositions, embodied engagements and methodological gestures that enable designers to remain present to what exceeds representation. This practice does not interpret, diagnose or “heal” landscapes. Instead, it creates the conditions under which landscape-bound residues—material, affective, symbolic and historical—may disclose themselves as operative presences. Imagination, in this sense, is not extractive or projective, but receptive, responsive and relational. The theoretical framework of the course draws on four complementary strands of thought that each articulate a distinct mode of landscape presence: _Existential presence (Gabriel Marcel), foregrounding availability, non-objectifying attention and ethical restraint. _Atmospheric and affective experience (Neue Phänomenologie: Schmitz, Böhme, Griffero, Bégout), emphasizing the primacy of bodily attunement and spatial mood. _Spectral and temporal presence (Hauntology), addressing how absences, residues and unresolved histories continue to shape contemporary landscapes. _Exposure and material encounter (Alphonso Lingis), insisting on vulnerability, intensity and the non-human address of places. These perspectives are not taught as abstract theory but as operational lenses, each paired with situated exercises in landscape experience, fieldwork and reflective articulation. Through these exercises, students develop practices of attunement, situated engagement, provisional articulation and collective co-existence that precede and inform design thinking. In relation to the parallel agro-ecological design studio, Landscape & Imagination functions as a pre-design formative space. It equips students with the capacity to sense slow processes, attend to invisible dynamics, and engage landscapes as living, historically charged fields rather than neutral substrates for intervention. The course thus complements design work not by supplying concepts or methods, but by cultivating the conditions of presence, care and responsiveness upon which meaningful ecological design depends. Ultimately, Landscape & Imagination positions imagination as a shared, situated and transformative practice—one that does not impose futures upon landscapes, but learns to participate in the futures landscapes themselves make imaginable.

Resources