The Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning’s LA 101 Design class came to the garden for their yearly three week project entitled “Revealing a Landscape”. Each student, undergraduate and graduate, are to find a place in the garden to highlight by creating a temporary installation using simple materials.
These Photographs of the student installations were taken at Blake Garden in October of 2008. A description of the project follows:
Project: “Revealing a Landscape”
Class: LA 101 (LAEP UC Berkeley)
Teachers: Judith Stilgenbauer, Daphne Edwards
Site: Blake Garden
The purpose of the 3 week project (Sept. 22 – Oct. 13) was to investigate the qualities of the landscape that can be captured or revealed as part of a new design. Using Blake Garden as a landscape laboratory, the students constructed and installed full scale 1 to 1 mockups of the projects (seen in these photographs), models at 1/2″ = 1′ scale, and drawings in section and in plan. Their final project boards also included photographs of the site. Among the qualities revealed by the various designs were: light, space, enclosure, paths, water features, views, growth, and geological activity.
An enormous space that has traditionally been refered to as the “cow pond” is being cleared by volunteers Natasha Liu and Peter Suchecki. They have been clearing old downed trees, stumps, roots and enormous vines of Algerian Ivy that were threatening to strangle out and cover all vegetation that was planted in this section.
During the fall semester LA 101, the beginning Design class in the Landscape Architecture Department did their yearly project of defining the landscape by choosing a site in the garden and installing a temporary installation the would call attention to that particular site. MLA student Alyssa Machle, chose the newly uncovered “cow pond” as a site for the project and developed a vortex of mud. She felt that the existing topography created a pull at the bottom of the slope and it appeared that the site was pulling in the toppling California Bay Laurel that is leaning over the pool of water.