Studio on Contemporary Issues : Designing the City and Territory with Water and Ecosystems

licar2616  2026-2027  Louvain-la-Neuve

Studio on Contemporary Issues : Designing the City and Territory with Water and Ecosystems
10.00 credits
120.0 h
Q2
Language
French
Main themes
The studio offers a new cumulative experience of the architectural design process.
Within the context of a world in ecological and social transition, the studio explores human relationships with water and ecosystems at architectural, urban, and territorial scales. The project will include analytical dimensions and the identification of potentials and qualities. New development proposals will be formulated in terms of morphologies, typologies and landscape extents and boundaries. The topic of water and ecosystems will not be handled in isolation, but will be integrated into a broader reflection incorporating themes such as housing, work, institutions, mobility, public and collective life. Specific attention will be attributed to the temporal development of the project (with regards to ordering and phasing of building interventions). The scales addressed will range from the territorial to the architectural. The documents produced will include both hand and computer-aided drawings, as well as written reports synthesizing the hypotheses, issues, methods, and objectives of the proposed investigations.
Learning outcomes

At the end of this learning unit, the student is able to :

  • Analyse and synthesize, through drawings, a given situation in its interdependent dimensions: landscape, urban and architectural
  • Investigate, through drawings, and within an iterative and reflective process, the potential of a given situation to accommodate new developments (morphological typological, programmatic)
  • Build a personal set of convictions and references to support their thinking, reinforcing an ethical stance regarding living systems (« le vivant »), both in its technical aspects and socio-cultural dimensions.
  • Integrate the question of dwelling with water and ecosystems into the architectural design process
  • Integrate research, specific to water and ecosystems, with other project dimensions (program, geography, histories of sites, social practices)
  • Develop an architectural project that integrates multiple issues and drivers (ecological, programmatic, constructional, typological, poetic…)
  • Choose and select adequate graphical methods, both physical and digital, to guide the project development and its representation
  • Take critical distance from one’s project under development; describe, analyse and critique its foundations, methods and objectives
  • Integrate the design process across multiple scales, from the landscape and urban context to the precise definition of architectonic, constructional, and technological elements – in other words, from context to detail
 
Faculty or entity
> LOCI


Programmes / formations proposant cette unité d'enseignement (UE)

Title of the programme
Sigle
Credits
Prerequisites
Learning outcomes
Bachelor in Engineering : Architecture
ARCH1BA
10
Master [120] in Architecture and Engineering
ARCH2M
10