Developing New Computational Methodologies for Data Integrated Design for Landscape Architecture

The form language of the currently ongoing trend of parametric design remains often symbolic and arbitrarily interchangeable. In order to counteract this general trend within landscape architecture, the increasing digitalization in design should not contribute to generating even greater meaningless complexity. The main goal within the postgraduate study program Master of Advanced Studies in Landscape Architecture (MAS LA) at the Chair of Prof. Chrsitophe Girot at ETH Zurich, is to examine which workflows are suitable for understanding a place with its given potentials as local data sets to generate a responsive and sustainable landscape design. Often data is integrated at the outset of the design process – in contrast, we would like to propose the thesis that an understanding of a site and the conceptual stance drawn from it influences the choice of data and not the contrary. It is therefore necessary to search for new methodic approaches and workflows in order to understand a place with its different contextual layers and integrate the right data as parameters in the process.