Kerb Journal of Landscape Architecture has put out the call for papers for its 21st edition. KERB is a student-run annual publication featuring works from distinguished practitioners and students alike and is produced and edited by students of the Department of Landscape Architecture at RMIT University. Kerb aims to highlight people and projects that are strengthening design discourse in a multi-disciplinary way.
Kerb 21 topic is ‘Peripheral Processes: Adapted Modes of Practice’ and will address the current issues unfolding within design discourse. We seek submissions documenting design projects and processes in the form of research, essays, sketches and diagrams, collage, prose, photography, film, digital animations or film, grassroots projects, folk and contemporary art and everything in between.
Kerb 21 seeks to identify adapted modes of practice in order to explore possible futures of landscape architecture. Submissions should serve as a section through practice and will be positioned amongst a broader context of influences. This issue aims to curate an exposition on alternate modes of practice and initiate discourse based on diversity.
Practitioners of landscape architecture tread the line between creator and curator. Practice is the ongoing accumulation of knowledge that tests ideas through research and application. Whilst practitioners can be flexible in their definition of knowledge, a collective knowledge must be negotiated to create a consistency of practice. Is thisconsistency of practice effective for building diversity?
Practicing and engaging on the periphery of multiple disciplines broadens the realm of landscape architecture. This forces a constant defining and redefining of landscape architecture, creating difference that enables the development of new knowledges. As new knowledges are adapted and/or created, they ultimately form the basis of alternate modes of practice. These modes of practice only survive so long as they remain relevant to the current condition. Factors influencing the current condition may be, but are not limited to economic instability, finite resources, shifting social values and advancements in technology and manufacturing.
Modes of practice that adapt to these factors might include new material investigations and applications, imaginative methods of procuring projects and establishing working environments, incorporation of the virtual or reconsidering the permanence of outcomes. These are just allusions to adapted modes of practice that may result in the emergence of new discourse and diversification within the discipline of landscape architecture. Kerb 21 asks – what are these alternate modes of practice and what are they reacting to?
Alternate modes of practice give us the tools to respond to the issues unfolding around us and to synthesise design thinking into other domains.
For more information about submitting a paper is available at KERB 21
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