This design studio explored what landscape or landscape architecture is by using the body as an inquiring tool to develop an architecture landscape project of moderate to high complexity. The intent is to challenge the dichotomy between architecture and landscape while exploring the implications of the spatial paradigm (space as a spatial-temporal dynamism) in the field of architecture by a sequence of performative interventions.

This project aims to form a series of interrelated components that bridge life and death, transforming ephemeral life into eternity. There are always intricate philosophical connotations in relation to mortality within the landscape. That ‘Bridge’ is both biological and spiritual. In nature, the dynamic and organic shifting between life and death happens all the time. The reciprocal relation shaped a close loop between life and death.

The ‘Filling the Void’ project is located on the tip of South Head, New South Wales, Australia, a headland to the north of the suburb Watsons Bay, accompanied by Hornby Lighthouse. The proposal was inspired by the poetic of the whale fall and the artificial coral reef technology, to design a sea burial crematorium with a loop cycle of reproducing the living from the dead. In this project, death, as an ‘entangled position’, is never a simple separation from life, it serves as a culminative celebration of one’s life, both biological and spiritual.

Course Design Studio VI

Course Coordinator Margit Brünner