Course Description: This course is intended to provide students with an awareness and appreciation for contemporary landscape architecture. While the primary focus of the course will be from 1950 to the present, we will periodically reach farther back into history in order to better understand key historical precedent projects and designers that were or are influential to contemporary designers and projects. This course situates current practices through a survey of precedents, events and spatial developments across cultures and scales. In order to understand the projective discipline of landscape architecture, we must study how it has been informed, influenced and shifted over its relatively short existence.
2020
Key Readings
Hood, Walter, and Grace Mitchell Tada. Black Landscapes Matter . Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020.
Little Island - MNLA
2010-2020
Key Readings
Corner, James. “The Thick and the Thin of It” from Girot, Christophe, and Imhof, Dora. Thinking the Contemporary Landscape. 2017. (Pg 117-135)
Freccero, Carla. “Wolf, or Homo Homini Lupus” from Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt et al. Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. Ghosts of the Anthropocene ; Monsters of the Anthropocene . Minneapolis ;: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. (M91-M105)
River Aire - Superpositions
2000-2010
Key Readings
Lister, Nina Marie. “Sustainable Large Parks :Ecological Design or Designer Ecology?” From Large Parks. Edited by Czerniak, Julia., George Hargreaves, and John. Beardsley. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2007.
Waldheim, Charles.. “Landscape as Urbanism” from The Landscape Urbanism Reader. New York: Princeton Architectural, 2006. (Pg. 35-53).
Tianjin Qiaoyuan Wetland Park – Turenscape
1990-2000
Key Readings
Meyer, Elizabeth. "The Expanded Field of Landscape Architecture" from Thompson and Steiner's Ecological Design and Planning. 1997. (Pg. 45-79)
Treib, Marc. "Must Landscapes Mean? Approaches to Significance in Recent Landscape Architecture" in Landscape Journal 14.1. 1995. (Pg. 46-62).
Sweet Farm - PLANT
1980-1990
Key Readings
Beardsley, John. “Beyond Land Art” from Earthworks and Beyond : Contemporary Art in the Landscape. New York: Abbeville, 1984. (Pg. 88-133)
Geometric Gardens - Carl Sorensen
1970-1980
Key Readings
McHarg, Ian L. “Process and Form” & “The City: Process and Form” from Design with Nature. 25th Anniversary ed. New York: J. Wiley, 1992. (Pg. 163- 185)
Bagel Garden-Martha Schwartz
1960-1970
Key Readings
Kunstler, James Howard. The Geography of Nowhere : the Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape . New York: Simon & Schuster.
Jackson, John Brinckerhoff, and Zube, Ervin H. “Jefferson, Thoreau & Aer” and “The many Guises of Suburbia”. Landscapes: Selected Writings of J. B. Jackson. Amherst: U of Massachusetts, 1970. (Pg. 1-9, 113-115)
Portland Open Space- Lawrence Halprin
1950-1960
Key Readings
Eckbo, Garrett. “The World We Live in - Man and Nature” from Landscape for Living. New York: Architectural Record with Duell, Sloan, & Pearce, 1950. (Pg. 29-45).
Miller Garden - Dan Kiley