Owen Harries Landscape Blog

 Following my first post of second year, where I reflected on my year-out, I feel I should now reflect on my first semester back at university as Christmas draws nearer. I still feel tha tmy year-out was the best decision I ever made, coming back to university has been incredibly enjoyable, and I have definitely made the most of the experience both inside, and outside of university. In terms of modules, I have enjoyed aspects of them all, however I have especially enjoyed sustainable technologies and design projects. Being able to start working on real-world sites both surveying, and in the case of sustainable technologies, designing them. I look forward to the design aspects of the North Place site in second semester for design projects. The design project of Barnwood Park and Arboretum in sustainable technologies has interested me so much due to it's scale, and the increased complexity from first year with more emphasis on SuDS chains and waste water treatment, not to mention my ...

 In our class' proffessional practice module last week, we had group discussions and brain storming sessions to discuss the sustainability aspects of running a landscape archtiect practice, as well as what goals we could make to achieve these. We predominantly considered sustainability goals in the categories of social, economic, environmental, and political. Below is an image of the mindmap from our group which we presented to the class.

 In our design studio lecture, we were tasked to create criteria which we would want from a garden design, and then pass this to the person sat opposite us. We then had to draw a plan of the person opposite us's desired space. This was a fun exercise for practicing keeping to a brief, and putting more thought into how much area certain elements such as the lawn takes up in a design based on the client's wishes. We then had to 'sell' these ideas to the person opposite who we swapped with. I was tasked to make a productive, formal garden with no more than 30% lawn, espalier apple trees, a fire pit, and their favourite colour was blue, and their favourite tree was Prunus avium (the focal point)

 This is an image of my display of the main design elements which I have developed for my sustainable techology module. This was a session to give and receive feedback from our peers, bounce ideas off eachother, and to help guide our work in the right direction. I found the feedback from this session a very useful way of thinking about my designs differently, and seeing how other people design and present their work for this project. As well as some of the sketches from my previous post, I also included three A3 scaled print-outs of my design from AutoCAD, and did some quick rendering on two of the sheets in Photoshop. These renders proved to be positive in the feedback I received, and were effective at showing more clearly what different elements of my design were without the need for excessive annotation.