Teaching time: Working across scales in the Aarhus River Valley

This paper uses two project-based semester assignments from Studio 1A: Urban Design|Landscape Archicture (UD|LA) and the Aarhus School of Architecture to argue for a cross-scalar approach that enables landscape architecture students to grasp the complexity and urgency in dealing with current challenges of urbanisation in the Anthropocene.

Through two different situations, one urban, another suburban, the two semester assignments use the Aarhus River Valley as a shared common ground. In this context, the paper investigates how urbanisation can be informed by landscape contextual understandings across scales in the river valley.

The semester assignments are driven by both research-based teaching and research-by-design driven explorations in multiple scales with the goal to explore how this can inform and qualify design proposals for the two given urban situations.

The explorations span from 1:1 hands-on experiments to the testing of software based on machine learning for spatial volume studies to well-known and often used tools and formats like mappings, plans, sections, models, etc.

While the hands-on experiments include implementing several small-scale, 1:1 transformations of i.e. forest landscapes based on the students' (1) physical engagement, (2) careful site readings and (3) considerations about future spatial conditions, the machine learning software is used as a digital tool through which different scenarios of urban settings are explored. Central for this is the question of how a cross-scalar approach can fascilitate the ability to translate findings from one scale into design proposals in another, and vice versa.

This is important, as it teaches students to reveal the rich complexity of sites and situations across scales as well as the context in which these are situated. Here context is also to be understood through its active Latin root ‘contexere’ denoting an act of weaving rather than its more static common meaning.