Norman Villeroux
Job title:
Teaching Fellow in Landscape Architecture
Office:
R.03a, Hunter Building
Biography
Norman Villeroux is a landscape architect, musician, and educator based in Glasgow, Scotland. Working across design, sound, and research, he is currently a Teaching Fellow in Landscape Architecture at the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (ESALA), organising and teaching research-driven design studios. His landscape architectural research investigates Quiet Places, inaccessible, inhospitable, distant and fragile landscapes entangled in large earthly systems, such as the glacial landscapes of Iceland or the West Lothian Shale bings of Central Scotland, using speculative and narrative-led approaches and exploring themes of deep time, climate change, and ecological transformation.
His experience includes taking part in an architectural educational program in Mexico with the office TOA_ASPJ, aimed at exposing different ways of consolidating damaged structures, through film and craft, in response to the 2017 Puebla Earthquake, whilst also working as a freelance Landscape Architect, ranging from public art interventions to live performances, most notably with Iglu Studio.
Norman teaches a final year design studio for students in Landscape Architecture (MA // MLA). The Quiet Places studio is a design studio which takes the form of a speculative research expedition into the Vatnajökull Glacier in Iceland – a complex landscape tied into multi-scalar earthly systems, and quickly disappearing due to Global Warming. The studio focuses on how our attention to climate change is mostly directed towards its impact on human societies and landscapes, leaving faraway places and barely inhabited landscapes in obscurity. These faraway places are what Donna Haraway calls Quiet Places, fragile landscapes sitting on the extreme periphery of our imagination but playing a central role in the changing of our climate.
The Quiet Places I: Vatnajökull Glacier studio will be centered on the specificity of the Vatnajökull Glacier in Iceland as a Quiet Place, engaging with the qualities that define it, such as inaccessibility, extreme conditions, and incredible dynamic processes, as well as imagining a speculative future for a disappearing landscape.
The studio will act as an experimental research expedition into the Vatnajökull, in an attempt to uncover the importance of these Quiet Places, and how they might be tied into multi-scalar earthly systems. As such, the studio will focus on the conception of unique landscape architectural proposals engaging with the complexity of such dynamic and inaccessible landscapes, through the careful use of thorough analysis, extensive experimentation, multi-scalar dynamic thinking, scientific equipment and instruments and design fiction/speculation.
