LA 1110 (170)
Site Design in Fall 2024: Dexter Plaza, Cal Poly Campus
I teach 170 as an extensive hand drawing workshop where students learn industry standard graphics for plan, section, and perspective views for all plant and hardscape types and landscape structures. The course is a foundation for students’ academic and professional careers, as it is their first studio at Cal Poly. Thus, students learn architectural and engineering scales through hands-on and in-studio activities, and progress through the design process.
First, students measure a real site on campus and create a base map at 10 scale, starting on a blank sheet of paper. Then, students perform site analysis, take inventory, interview the site’s users, and go through functional and form diagramming. Then, students proceed to render an illustrative plan, section, and perspective. Perspective work is taught through conventional techniques in perspective creation.
The course proceeds from workshops which teach individual skills (for example, one day devoted to plan view plants), and the techniques they use in the workshops are applied to larger projects. The first project the class completes is a hypothetical park project. The second, large project involves redesigning a real site on campus and proceeding through the design process. All lessons pair hands-on learning with in-studio workshops. For example, students learn scale through measuring objects outside and drawing them to scale in the studio. Also, students learn how to measure, analyze, and redesign a site that is adjacent to the studio. Frequent site visits allow the reality of their design to come to light.
My teaching techniques proceed from large to small, detailed elements of park and space design. For example, first students must develop the form framework of their site, circulation routes, user experience (functions), and then develop the planting design, hardscape design, and furniture selection. I find that teaching students planting design techniques early in their career helps them when I teach them in a construction documents studio where these skills are further refined.
The first series of projects shown below are where students redesigned a real site on campus and created plan, sections, and perspectives. The series of projects toward the end of this compilation shows the students’ hypothetical park project, where they are learning to design with one form type (rectilinear, organic, radial, etc.).
