Masterclass with Kenneth Frampton, Kelly Shannon and Charles Waldheim
Guest lectures by Martin Biewenga, Ciro Najle and Alejandro Zaera-Polo

In the wake of ‘an ecologically grounded landscape-urbanism’ – envisaged, as Frampton states, as a ‘critical discipline that would be capable of transcending the politico-technical impasse now confronting the architecture and urban design profession’ – the question that rises to the fore is what exactly are the operative tools and instruments for its realization? How can landscape urbanism be defined? To date there has been an ambiguous discourse that surrounds the emerging field and simultaneously a host of projects that associate themselves with the trend.
The masterclass attempted to understand the existing discourse and to link the theories with projects, through parallel critical comparative analysis.
Participants worked in international teams of 6/7 architects to study both a pair of ‘theorists’ and confronted these with a number of projects. Each team presented a ‘definition’ of landscape urbanism and argued its (non) validity through several projects in a final review evaluated by guest critics.