Course Description: This course provides an introduction to design and planning as intellectual disciplines that shape and sustain regional and global environments. Discussion will address landscape architecture, urban design, and planning perspectives and theory. The course offers students space and time to reflect, discuss and write on topics of theoretical and methodological interest within and adjacent to the professions of the built environment. This includes re-defining our scope of discussions to include the expanded field of ‘landscape practice’ and lifeways of ‘landscape being’. The course will ask students to work through a range of theoretical positions, from ancient traditions to radical contemporary methodologies in, or related to, landscape architecture, foregrounding a tentacular approach of seeing reading/ hearing/feeling/empathizing with landscape. The course will be set within a framing through four ‘theatres of thought’, a series of territories across the world which play host to histories and precedents of helpful landscape practice, landscape theory, and landscape thinking, in which will help situate or embody the topics discussed throughout the course.
2023
Instructor // Gale Fulton, Faye Nixon, and Chad Manley
Marti Roca Busacker, Fall 2023
Abbey Freed, Fall 2023
Allyssa Clements, Fall 2023
Cortney Wolfe, Fall 2023
Exercise (Module) 3 –‘The Borrowed Sentence’
This writing module exercised skills in critical reading, and critical writing. Each week students were asked to find a meaningful sentence + word/concept from the course texts, and integrate these into a larger piece their own writing on a self-directed topic in landscape architecture. The intention of this assignment was to help you isolate meaningful concepts from the literature, and synthesize these into a coherent string of ideas through the rubric of ‘mashup culture’, whereby samples of nomenclatures, attitudes, and styles are artfully combined and mixed. The secondary intent was to prescribe accretive assignments to support self-generated writing responses, circumventing pressure from AI generated essays.
Allyssa Clements, Fall 2023
Abbey Freed, Fall 2023
Cortney Wolfe, Fall 2023
Instructor // Chad Manley
Alice Irizarry, Fall 2022
Jenna Ely, Fall 2022
2021
Instructor // James Billingsley
Essay by Kari Essary, Fall 2021
Essay by Aubrey Bader, Fall 2021
2019
Instructor // Gale Fulton
EXERCISE-LANDSCAPE SCI-FI
For this informal exercise, students were asked to read a sample of science fiction chapters and create a drawing based on that reading. Reading samples drawn were from Paolo Bacigalupi's Water Knife, Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy, and Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. This goal of this exercise was to provoke students to think about how such literary descriptions might inform the landscape architectural imagination through the visualization of materials, spaces, forms, and atmospheres described in the texts.
