Andrea Hansen, the 2013–14 Bickham Chair at LSU Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture, will lead the first of two workshops January 23–27 in the CADGIS Lab of the LSU Design Building. “Workshop 1: Datascapes & Analysis” can accommodate up to 40 students and is open to all landscape architecture graduate students and fifth-year undergraduate students. First-year graduate students are required to attend.

Hansen is a lecturer in landscape architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she teaches core and option studios and lectures on representation and advanced digital media. Her research, writing, and design practice, Fluxscape, focuses on the use of open source data and Web platforms to map conditions and spur change in urban environments.

“Workshop 1: Datascapes & Analysis” will introduce new methodologies and workflows for mapping, manipulating, and designing with geospatial data, with a goal of transcending the flat, static map into live documents that expand the representation of time and space—in order to better address the dynamic conditions of changing cities and shifting lands.

Beginning by tracing the evolution of cartography and landscape modeling, the workshop will move into an overview of critical GIS techniques that represent change in landscape systems. From there, the workshop will introduce basic methods of generating and interacting with landform using Rhino and RhinoTerrain. To close, Hansen will preface the second workshop, to be held March 6–10 (“Workshop 2: Datascapes & Design”), with a brief look into how GIS and parametric techniques (Grasshopper) can be combined to form more responsive and performative landscape designs.

Each day’s session will begin with a short lecture, introducing contemporary and historic visual material and design precedents from contemporary practice, followed by hands-on skills laboratory sessions using GIS, Rhino, RhinoTerrain, and Grasshopper. Each skills lab will center on a design exercise that covers a range of applied skills while also producing high-quality visual material.

Office hours following the morning workshops are aimed at elevating the visual quality of the datascape drawings, which will be compiled at the end of the second workshop for display at the Datascapes symposium to be held March 11–14, 2014, at the school. The exercises and related symposium material will also be included in the Datascapes publication.