Today, Natural Light introduced to you a student Guan who applied for a zero foundation RISD landscape design portfolio. She has a bachelor's degree in urban and rural planning from Peking University. She applied for a master's degree in landscape design in the United States. She went from Peking University to winning a master's degree in four universities. With her ability and efforts, she proved that landscape design Xiaobai can also achieve good results with zero foundation, Today, we are going to introduce to you a series of questions about Guan's art study abroad, his collection of landscape works abroad, and his application.

In natural light, Guan can definitely be said to be worthy of the name of "Xueba". His bachelor's degree is from the urban and rural planning major of Peking University. His master's degree was applied for the American landscape design major, and finally he was offered by four universities: Rhode Island School of Design RISD ($5000 scholarship), USC ($8590 scholarship), University of Michigan ($22500 scholarship), University of Virginia.

Introduction to application experience of zero foundation RISD landscape design overseas works collection:

Although the undergraduate major is urban and rural planning, this major is not the same as landscape design, so for Guan, she can be regarded as a little white with zero basic landscape design. Having no experience of landscape design and little knowledge of relevant professional knowledge, the teacher and Guan set up a preliminary study and curriculum plan for the collection of landscape works going abroad after preliminary communication with her classmates. They first took basic courses, passed basic courses, and entered the landscape design major.

Collection of Landscape Works Going Abroad

During the basic course of Landscape Works Abroad, the teacher felt a very strong "learning dominating magnetic field", "Guan is very clear and calm about her future planning. She is also well organized about her courses and projects. Even if the teacher does not urge her to hand in her homework, she can basically complete it in advance. In fact, her school work is also very tense for the previous part of the course. In some divergent thinking exercises, she can often give me many surprises. For example, I asked her to give me 10 small plans, but she often presents me more than 10 in the end. "

The strong self-discipline and high requirements for oneself not only let the teacher see the potential of Guan's classmates, but also let the teacher and Guan's classmates quickly build a trust relationship, and the curriculum rhythm and interaction mode between them become more comfortable.

In fact, this relationship has brought a lot of "convenience" to Guan's courses and saved her a lot of time and energy. We all know that under the overseas teaching mode, the learning relationship between teachers and students is often very equal and open. Even if teachers are very experienced designers, when facing students, they are mostly inspired by the attitude of enlighteners. Through "academic exchanges" with students, they can discuss with students, so that students can gain understanding from the level of thinking and ideas, Instead of directly imposing their own ideas on students.

For teachers, on the one hand, every discussion with students is also a learning experience; On the other hand, maintaining an equal relationship with students can also let students express their ideas most relaxed and trusted, so as to better help students.

In the natural light of the same teaching mode, Guan quickly entered the state, with a high sense of self-discipline and time planning awareness, so that she has accumulated rich professional ability and thinking awareness during the basic course of landscape overseas works collection.

Put college majors into the portfolio and turn "high difficulty" into "comfort zone"

Because Guan didn't have any Study abroad in landscape design In fact, it is difficult to switch the creation status immediately at the beginning of the course of Landscape Works Abroad, so the teacher communicated with Guan. The teacher also learned that Guan's professional ability during his undergraduate period was very solid, and he also had a higher understanding and cognition of his original major than others. At the same time, Guan was good at rational analysis and opinion sorting. However, in terms of the divergence of thinking consciousness, Guan is still a little stiff and not very good at spherical multi-dimensional thinking.

Grasping the advantages and disadvantages of Guan, the teacher began to guide Guan to try and think boldly, find her own interests, encourage her to combine her advantages and expertise, and carry out divergent creation and thinking. Finally, Guan and the teacher together determined the creative direction of the first project: using the school's homework during the undergraduate period as background information.

Drawings involved in garden design scheme

In order to avoid Guan being too "original professional" during the project creation, this project only takes the background information of the original homework as the starting point of the work collection. In this project, Guan met the first problem in the creation of the collection of works - jumping out of the original professional thinking.

The project as a whole is planning oriented. For such a project, early research and analysis are very important and need to spend a lot of time and energy to complete. At the same time, however, it is very unfortunate that Guan is also in a period of intense school courses and more homework.

However, even under such pressure, Guan did not procrastinate and still showed a high degree of self-discipline and enthusiasm. The preliminary project research took a lot of time, almost two months. During this period, Guan has been combing the overall thinking and preliminary analysis with teachers.

The teacher and she made a lot of early planning together, consulted books together, and did backtalk. Every time when they finished, Guan would actively communicate with the teacher, reflecting on whether there were any omissions in the process and whether they were thoughtful.

Although more time was spent in the early stage, it was also the foreshadowing of the early stage, and the later scheme refinement and construction were carried out smoothly. For each scheme analysis and node refinement, in addition to active discussion with the teacher in class, Guan kept putting forward his own ideas. After class, he would also spend a lot of time to think about his own ideas, communicate with the teacher at the first time, and begin to prepare the landscape design collection.

Collection of Landscape Works Going Abroad

"Guan is really one of the few students I have ever met. She tries her best. Every time I ask her a question, she will think about it. And she is willing to try to put her own ideas into practice. She seldom says to me, 'Teacher, I don't want to do it', or 'Teacher, this is too difficult. Shall we change our way? ’She never prattles. She has the feeling of doing what she wants. Even if we encounter a plan that is difficult to chew, she is willing to take it. I am very happy to see her growing every step.

Because we are in her RISD landscape design Portfolio training At the stage of the course, the relationship is very peaceful. I will not ask her what she must do or how she must feel in the end. I hope to give her space to think on her own and let her complete the project by herself, so that she can really feel that 'this is landscape design', 'the original landscape can be like this, not planting trees and building blocks on the ground'. She also surprised and moved me, because she can always exceed our expectations. "

With the joint efforts of Guan's students and teachers, the first project was almost completed soon, and the final overall plan was arranged in a very orderly way, with rich information on each page, and all of them showed Guan's ability in one aspect.

Won the high intensity project in the short term, and the preliminary preparation brought unexpected results

Project 2 is a summer course project with the theme of "sponge city and wetland park", which is a hot topic at home and abroad in recent years. For Guan, this work is the first landscape design project in a real sense.

In this project, she and her classmates in studio will discuss together and finally solve the problem. Urban waterlogging and lack of fresh water resources have become a common problem in our lives, and this problem has puzzled us for a long time. Landscape designers all over the country and the world are also trying to find ways to solve the problem of rain and flood, and at the same time repair/rebuild the ecological balance.

Guan and her partners need to analyze the current situation and existing problems of the site through field research, so as to design a final plan that can not only solve urban waterlogging/restore balanced ecology according to the nature of the surrounding land, but also integrate various activity areas and enrich the project content.

During this period, it is necessary to combine landscape ecology, botany, spatial theory, terrain shaping, pedology, climatology and other professional knowledge. Such a highly professional project, even if it is team work, also has certain challenges. However, in this project, Guan made good use of the research and analysis skills he had mastered in the first project stage.

In this project, she is also the first time to draw a landscape scale scheme by hand. At the beginning, she really felt a little difficult. She was always dissatisfied with the design scheme, but she has been working hard to discuss with teachers and students, referring to relevant cases and projects. She has repeatedly revised the unsatisfied areas, and also paid attention to the relationship between the local and the overall scheme, and the final presentation effect, It also exceeded everyone's expectations.

Due to interdisciplinary cooperation, this project also integrates some professional content of interaction design. Therefore, when determining the theme for the interaction design major in the early stage, Guan also participated in it, and used his landscape and planning knowledge to put forward some creative suggestions to the students of the interaction design major.

Before the summer class, Guan's classmates and teachers determined the purpose of the summer class, quickly improved her professional awareness of landscape design in the short term, and quickly adapted to the "interdisciplinary" learning environment and creative direction. At the same time, despite the strong learning initiative and self-consciousness, Guan still has some limitations in creative thinking.

Compared with the students whose original major was art design, she still needs a lot of material cognition training and creative thinking improvement training. Through this short training of more than 10 days, the concentrated cooperation with students from other disciplines to build projects can also help Guan students quickly open their own brain holes.

Finally, the project went very smoothly, and it was this project that made Guan quickly realize the interest and necessity of interdisciplinary creation. In the following projects, Guan also gradually carried out more smoothly.

Once lived in the natural light, even the details were taken care of

These two projects mentioned above are the ones with a large concentration of Guan's overseas landscape works. In addition to these two projects, she has also done three projects.

During the composition of RISD Landscape Design's overseas portfolio, because American colleges and universities have very strict restrictions on the number of pages in the portfolio, she also spent a lot of time in the composition, not only to retain all important drawings and information, but also to choose to give up part of the content with weight, at the same time to make the composition look orderly and not logical.

It is necessary to say more here that American colleges and universities can almost use "inflexible" to describe the page limit of their portfolios, which is a requirement that cannot be ignored. Because almost all American colleges and universities must pass the slideroom when submitting their portfolios. When your number of pages exceeds the limit, the slideroom will remind you that you can no longer upload.

Take Guan's zero foundation RISD landscape design as an example. What the school requires is to submit the content in the format of 10 pictures of landscape overseas works. When uploading through the slideroom, when submitting to the 11th work, it will be prompted that it is impossible to upload more works. Therefore, if you are a student who wants to apply to an American college, and the school clearly stipulates the number of pages of your portfolio, you must carefully comply with the application requirements.

Returning to Guan, she was strict with herself, even some small details. So before she submitted her application for DDL, she used to live in natural light. She painted late every day, and basically got up immediately after sleeping for a while. All of this is for the best presentation of your collection of works.

Guan has now received offers from four schools, three of which have offered offers, and her performance is very good. Since she just came here, she doesn't know anything about the natural light. She needs to start from the basic course and be able to think independently in the later stage. She also gives me some creative surprises from time to time. I witnessed her growth process.

Today, Natural Light introduced Guan Guan's overseas works collection of landscape design and the application strategy of zero foundation RISD landscape design works collection. I think it is no accident that she can get such a result. I often hear the saying, 'There is a lucky component in applying to art schools'. I don't deny it, but I also think it needs a little luck, But if you want to have luck at last, you must make 100% efforts in the early stage. Only when you are ready and luck comes, will you really meet it.

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