Landscape Terrain Modelling

Digital terrain modelling has been a growing necessity in architecture and landscape architecture practice as increasingly difficult, more complex sites are developed or renewed. Projects such as the Victorian Desalination Plant, Aspect studios (2012), the Wenchuan Earthquake Memorial Museum by Cai Yongjie (2015), and the Canadian Canoe Museum by Heneghan Peng Architects, with Kearns Mancini Architects (2020), demonstrate evolving design practices that work deftly employ earthwork manipulation.

However, complex skills and detailed level of control required, to work with and operate on digital terrains are proving difficult for both students and industry to develop. Thus, Landscape Architecture faces a disciplinary ‘retooling’ that must begin to be addressed in educational institutions. In this session we will discuss the rapid and often divergent development of software, tools and techniques evolving in this field.