Landscape Architecture Design Studios

Both Landscape Architecture MA and Landscape Architecture MLA are taught partly through Design Studios. Seven Studios are running in the current academic year. Please find briefs for each Studio below.

Studio 1

Feral Landscape Myths

Eric Guibert and Emma Colthurst 

This year, DS1 will continue our exploration of feral landscapes, by focusing on the ‘feral myth’. We will imagine, interrogate, and utilise myths that, while created by humans, have the potential to transform our understanding of other-than-human species and our relationships with ‘others’ and one another. For centuries, myths have offered explanations for natural phenomena, especially those whose cause or explanation are unknown. Our studio will embrace this uncertainty, as we become mythmakers with landscapes and the many species that shape our collective world. While we must be critical of the myths and the stories we tell, our studio utilises mythmaking as a hopeful, regenerative, and care-based practice. 

We continue our exploration of strange political and abstract lines as we investigate the Metropolitan Green Belt surrounding London. We visit places that have inspired the writing of myths, as we go to Rome to chase spirits and meet monsters in vast ruins and villas. 

Image Caption: Yongpu (Korner) Wu, ‘Decay Memorial’. Studio 1 2025. 

Studio 2 

Site Half Living: Social Ecologies in the Symbiocene 

Cannon Ivers and Alexandru Malaescu 

“When future generations look back upon the great derangement they will certainly blame the leaders and politicians of this time for their failure to address the climate crisis. But they may well hold artists, [DESIGNERS] and writers to be equally culpable – for the imagining of possibilities is not, after all, the job of politicians and bureaucrats.” Amitav Ghosh 

What is the agency of the landscape architect when we consider the ‘imagining of possibilities’ for our cities, streets, and spaces as we collectively confront the challenge of the climate crisis? The studio will pursue speculative scenarios for existing streets, parks, squares, green spaces, fragments, and edges that often under perform in the city, particularly in the face of a changing climate where absorptive, living, and sequestering landscapes will be increasingly important. Biodiversity and ecology will be a new form of currency, as Richard Weller writes, “As they do with culture, cities will soon compete to be the most biodiverse.” (2) https://dirt.asla.org/2022/04/18/earth-day-interview-with-richard- weller-a-bold-vision-for-global-conservation/   

Image Credit: Fengyi (Chloe) Wu, ‘Urban Living Library’. Studio 2 2024.  

Studio 4

Breaking Ground

Katya Larina and Doug Miller  

“We are stuck with the problem of living despite economic and ecological ruination. Neither tales of progress nor of ruin tell us how to think about collaborative survival.” Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins  

When looking at contemporary landscape design it’s clear that we operate in a world in which ‘ideal’ conditions are illusory, compromised. Unsettled terrains we contend with are shaped by, extraction, degradation, climate disruption - the traces of human intervention. 

Last year’s investigations centred on the forest as the climactic stage of ecological succession. In doing so, we encountered the limits of the classical ecological model — the idea that succession progresses inevitably toward a stable, balanced climax  state. Instead, we found that ecological succession is nonlinear, unstable, and constantly disrupted. Climate fluctuations, soil conditions, and human interventions prevent ecosystems from achieving equilibrium. These systems are known as disclimax ecologies. This year, our studio turns to the deep section of the landscape as a key investigative tool. We will ask what kind of cuts, slices or extractions can be used to reveal the unseen. 

Studio 4 this year will explore and design landscapes of all characters that are in flux, that which is lost, unknown and unpredictable. 

Image Caption: Nana Mikami, ‘Plant Blindness Mapping’. Studio 4 2025.  

Studio 5

Temporal Terrain 

Laurence Blackwell Thale and Pete Davies 

Studio 5’s brief this year explores the theme of ‘Temporal Terrain’. Temporal Terrain brings together the fleeting and the enduring, the seasonal and the momentary, leading each designer to question the connotations of defining and engaging with ecology. Landscape archaeology serves as a fundamental design driver, encouraging investigations into the histories and layered narratives of sites, and into design at multiple scales. How might design propositions navigate the challenges of environmental fragility while acknowledging radical shifts in our understanding of landscape interactions? What could the future of landscape interference look like, and how might our projects speculate on its evolving culture and celebrate the importance and future of lost or overlooked archaeologies? 

Image Caption: Chuan (Vincent) Chen, ‘Wind, Water and the Weight of Memory’. Studio 5 2025.  

Studio 8

Clouds 

Tom Budd and Kirsty Badenoch

As visible clouds drift lazily over our heads, we are also surrounded by an unseen, charged environment. Digital signals and virtual clouds project and connect to remote servers at seemingly instantaneous speeds, creating a hidden choreography that intertwines our digital and physical worlds. Both these environments are undergoing radical shifts. Our physical environment is facing a very real crisis driven by overconsumption, whilst our digital landscapes are poised for dramatic growth and evolution. This year Studio 8 will take on the role of ‘Cloud Gazers’, speculating on our future landscapes in the reaction to seismic digital, infrastructural and environmental shifts. We will ask how we react to shifting digital infrastructures from an ecological perspective? How do we design with and without control, allowing natural systems to lead and within this global drive for connection, how can we as humans disconnect from the endless static and noise clouding our everyday lives? 

In Studio 8 we believe in a process-driven approach to design, forming ideas through the act of doing: drawing, making, crafting and visualising. We believe that the way a project is crafted should directly impact its design development, adopting innovative approaches to the way we develop Landscape thinking. 

Image Caption: Sam Hammant, ‘Subverting Euston’. Studio 8 2025.  

Studio 10

Mineral Memories: Landscape as Archive Across Industrial and Extractive Territories 

Tutors: Alberto Campagnoli and Günther Galligioni 

Studio 10 explores the concept of landscape as memory, viewing sites not as static grounds but as living archives where geology, culture, and industry intertwine. Set between London’s infrastructural intensities on industrial sites in Cody Dock and Park Royal, and the dispersed mining terrains of Sardinia’s Geo-mining Park, the studio investigates how landscapes register and transmit histories of production, extraction, and transformation. Through comparative fieldwork, mapping, and design research, students will engage with themes of industrial heritage, ecological regeneration, and collective identity, reimagining how forgotten or saturated territories might foster new forms of resilience and continuity. Linking London’s data infrastructures to Sardinia’s mineral strata, Mineral Memories frames landscape as both physical and mnemonic, where stone and soil, water and data, all become carriers of memory and catalysts for future renewal. 

Image Caption: Günther Galligioni, ‘Laveria Brassey, Ingurtosu, Sardinia’. 2024.