Farewell lecture by Jusuck Koh

Everyone attentively listened to his speech, which lasted almost an hour and a half. At the end of the speech Sybrand Tjallingii (TU Delft), Bas Pedroli (WUR) and Dirk Sijmons (H+N+S) gave a short reflection on the speech.

Video messages by Jon Lang and Frits Steiner where shown, and Sands Lenzholzer read a letter from Carl Steinitz, all addressed to Jusuck.

During the drinks the staff members and students put together a presentation, which partially consisted of spoken comments and thank you messages.

On the whole the atmosphere was very relaxed and sociable. 

For those interested the Farewell Address by Jusuck Koh 'On a Landscape Approach to Design, an eco-poetic interpretation of landscape.' can be downloaded and read here.

An abstract of the speech:

In his farewell lecture, Professor Jusuck Koh yesterday afternoon emphasized design as the core of the landscape architecture discipline and put forward the necessity for a distinctive theory, method and representation of landscape architecture rather than borrowing from other disciplines. The true nature of landscape itself requires design methods based on time, scale and context.

He discussed a landscape approach to design in contrast to an architectural or an ecological approach to design. A landscape approach accepts landscape as ecological and poetic, scientific and aesthetic, as opposed to a formal and formalist approach. A landscape approach is different from an ecological approach in that the former goes beyond the scientific by recovering both poetic and representational aspects of landscape as culture. A landscape approach frames ecological processes to be expressive of human care, meaning and values.

Design, in a landscape approach, thus becomes not just form-making but contextualizing and process-ordering. The landscape approach is already being practiced in a variety of practices, not only in landscape architecture but in art, architecture, urbanism, regional planning and civil engineering as well. This supports his claim that a landscape approach exists and that its articulation is necessary and possible.

Jusuck Koh argued that a landscape approach changes our conception of design, and that a landscape approach to design can be a design method par excellence: integrative, dynamic, open, adaptive and humble. A landscape approach to design, implying large sale and long term, requires integration with research to deal with the complexity and emergent nature of landscapes as well as design. Design must be integrated with planning and management, respecting communication and appreciating the value of on-site monitoring, evaluation and adaptation. Landscape architects can take this challenge as an occasion to examine their own disciplinary knowledge base, and as a call to contribute to the contemporary urban discourse and the science and art of the landscape city.