This course examines a variety of modern and contemporary landscape design processes, along with their modes of representation, sociotechnical conditions, and materiality. Our survey will embrace all scales, from ornament to environment: private gardens as well as public parks, urban and regional planning. While concentrating this inquiry on landscape architecture and planning projects from Europe and the Americas that shaped the field over the twentieth century, we will be looking at their design connections with precedents from other time periods and cultural areas as well as other creative practices and academic disciplines. We will contemplate the biophysical and cultural dynamics of such projects, that is, their place and means of production (site, commission, construction), reception (maintenance, appropriation, reproduction), and interpretation (critique, historiography, dissemination as models). The key notion of “precedent” will be given special consideration. It will serve to bridge history with studio work. This year we will put the focus on the practice and theory of park systems and open space networks. We will examine how this legacy evolved over time in different contexts, shifting from socioeconomic and design concerns to ecology and sustainability in urban planning.