University Studio | Dynamics & Encounters: Fieldwork as Placemaking

The useful part

Fieldwork as Placemaking Winner of the Outstanding Award in the 2026 WLA Student Awards – University Studio category Process is one of the most fundamental aspects of landscape architecture. Developed over eight years, the studio brings students into direct contact with a world in flux, championing process-based methodologies within landscape design and design thinking. Operating in Hong Kong, the studio takes a purposefully rural approach to foreground issues and systems that shape the territory more broadly.

How it works

• The studio's format establishes a rigorous framework for metacognitive development through experiential learning.
• Fieldwork & Experiential Learning Woven throughout the studio, students visit the site at least twice (once with faculty, once independently).
• Fieldwork provides students with the opportunity to apply their learning and begin to develop new relationships with the environments they study.
• He is a registered landscape architect and works as a strategy and marketing consultant.
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What to take from it

In a rapidly developing region, cultivating students' capacity to perceive and experience these dynamics helps build adaptive and critically engaged future leaders in landscape architecture. Teaching it effectively requires care and attention. Sited in a remote village on Lantau Island, the studio introduces students to dynamic forces like erosion, water flows, atmospheres, and populations in flux.

Example or evidence

• This approach builds continuity, understanding and care across the broader curriculum.
• Design Process & Student Learning Each task in the studio builds on the previous one, forming a cumulative record of student thinking, development, and inquiry with both the site and their own evolving...
• Francisco Cevallos Barragan, William Shivers, PhD, Ivan Valin – University of Hong Kong About Damian Holmes 4267 Articles Damian Holmes is the Founder and Editor of World Landscape Architecture (WLA).
• They then undertake repeated site visits to ground-truth their observations and weave in their personal, situated reading of the site.

Details worth keeping

This introductory graduate studio situates process at its core. Students' repeated site visits are carried forward through an iterative working method, focusing on process models and drawings, which reflect a process of engaging representation as an epistemic tool for testing observations, framing questions, and generating design knowledge. For most students, this is their first exposure to design and design thinking.

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