Landscape Imagination

Philippe Vandenbroeck

Landscape & Imagination is a graduate-level course that repositions imagination from a cognitive or representational capacity to a situated, landscape-oriented practice of presence that is receptive to what exceeds representation, including atmospheric qualities, affective residues, temporal depth and more-than-human agencies. In contexts marked by ecological fragility and historical sedimentation, such forms of presence are not ancillary to design; they may well be foundational.

Throughout the course, students develop their own practice of imagination as it unfolds through different modes, including attunement, embodied engagement, mediated articulation, co-existential imagination and the possibility of transformational encounter. The emphasis lies on learning when to suspend the design reflex, when to act and navigate materially, when to articulate provisionally through images or diagrams, and when to remain with what resists intervention.

Theoretical inputs draw from phenomenology, atmospheric philosophy, hauntology and material ethics, but theory is introduced as a performative means of articulation rather than explanation. Guest lectures from international speakers will deepen the concepts foregrounded. The course complements these inputs with situated exercises in landscape experience, field-based inquiry and collective reflection, cultivating forms of attentiveness and ethical restraint.

Landscape & Imagination functions as a pre-design formative space. It does not aim to produce design proposals or strategic visions, but to condition the perceptual and imaginative ground from which responsible landscape practice may emerge, particularly in relation to agro-ecological and post-industrial territories. Students leave the course not with solutions, but with a transformed capacity to be present to landscapes that ask for time, patience and responsiveness rather than projection.