This studio focuses on the relationship between landscape architecture and culture. Together we explore the Landscape or Land as a physical, cognitive, spiritual, and emotional construct. The student experience is enriched through a weekly literary seminar, cultural ceremonies, as well as guest lectures and guided walks to present a wide range of cultural, academic, and professional perspectives. These opportunities to interrogate relationality between environmental, cultural, and aesthetic processes permit students to explore the complexities both temporally and spatially.

This course introduces students to the methods, media, and lexis of design communication, and provides an opportunity to exercise and develop modes of visual representation. Lectures will introduce successful examples of visual design communication, highlighting seminal and contemporary works, examining their root, effectiveness, and influence. These lectures will support class discussions and group critiques surrounding design assignments, giving members of the course an opportunity to practice the techniques and cultivate relationships between observing, conceptualizing, constructing, and communicating.

This visual communications course emphasizes the depiction of the ground and the exploration of phenomenological qualities of place over time. Through drawing, animation, and fabrication students will construct a visual narrative from a selection of culturally and historically significant earthworks such as colonial fortifications and indigenous burial mounds. Over the semester, students will analyze, model, and depict these sites in various scales and phenomenological conditions.

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.

This course continues the retrospective history of landscape architecture we initiated in LAN1031. In the latter, we looked at major modern, western landscape design principles and realizations extending from the twenty-first century back to the early twentieth. Emphasis was put on the notion of ‘precedent’ in design processes (including transfer and transformation) and its multiple layers (technical, material, social, political, economic, and so forth). In that regard, whenever relevant, we addressed non-western precedents, cultural contexts, and design traditions. As a sequel to this, the present course adopts a cross-cultural approach that encompasses the concepts, representations, and materialization of landscape designs worldwide, over a period stretching from the 19th century back to the first millennium CE. We will survey landscape design forms of production at all scales, from private gardens and public parks to estate management, environmental technology, and urban planning. Doing so, we will trace landscape design processes and their outcomes, from commission and design to written and visual discourse, reception, and historiography.

This course looks at plants as defining elements in landscape design, both by contemporary as well as historical example. Learning objectives include the identification and use a range of plants, as well as an understanding of the structural strata of vegetation and how species grow individually as well as in associations with one another. In addition to learning about planting in relationship to physical and environmental conditions, cycles of maturation, and the importance of seasonality and the senses, the course will introduce a range of disciplinary discourses and histories.

This course continues to look at plants as defining elements in landscape design, both by contemporary as well as historical example.

Learning objectives include the identification and use a range of plants, as well as an understanding of the structural strata of vegetation and how species grow individually as well as in associations with one another.

In addition to learning about planting in relationship to physical and environmental conditions, cycles of maturation, and the importance of seasonality and the senses; the course will introduce a range of disciplinary discourses and histories.

Field Studies I is devoted to observing, deciphering and documenting complex ecological systems in situ. The course teaches students to ask questions and record observations about the dynamic systems they encounter at immediate scales and in the everyday environment. Readings and discussions connect immediate observations to larger-scale questions about the interaction between human and more-than-human processes.

Field Studies II builds on the observational and documentary skills developed in Field Studies I. The course teaches students to relate their observations of the immediate landscape to regional ecological systems and phenomena. The goal is to observe, track and document these phenomena across scales of time and space.

"The shape of the ground is the foundation of all landscape."- Sylvia Crowe, Garden Design

Site Engineering introduces the concepts and techniques of site grading and topographic manipulation – all in pursuit of experience and function. Integration of structures, routes of circulation, ground plane manipulation and surface materials are just a few of the elements a designer can use to transform the performance and ultimately the phenomenology of a site.

"The shape of the ground is the foundation of all landscape." - Sylvia Crowe, Garden Design

Site Engineering II offers a continuation of grading concepts and techniques, with an emphasis on the interrelationship between technical and design issues. The course engages the basic principles of site engineering from site analysis, through conceptual design, to the technical aspects of grading and stormwater.

Forces that intertwine social and environmental issues manifest themselves physically in the built environment. For example, new density to alleviate housing inequity can sometimes occupy land that might otherwise have sequestered carbon and absorbed stormwater runoff. Robust green infrastructure for mitigating floods might inadvertently drive up land value and costs of housing resulting in a form of “climate gentrification”. This studio will negotiate these seemingly conflicting endeavours by providing a platform for students to engage in common areas and sites of research and design. Recognizing the immense social and environmental pressures our cities face today, the studio will ask students to re-conceive our neighbourhoods, highways, energy and food networks, affordable housing provisions, parks, stormwater systems, and other public assets that form the physical urban fabric and social safety nets.

In this ‘Comprehensive Studio’, a landscape project is developed from schematic design all the way to detailing, the studio invites students to engage with solving programmatic opportunities and challenges, through spatial thinking and design, while addressing questions of materiality and construction.

Intermediate Visual Communications departs from traditional Visual Communication course themes centered around the development of and techniques behind graphic language, and instead focuses on the in-depth exploration of two digital tools which benefit the landscape architectural design process and who's use is becoming much more common place in the professional field; Contextual Mapping and Cartographic Analysis using Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and Relational 3D digital modelling and design study investigations using Parametric Computation.

Contemporary Landscape Theory examines texts from recent publications in landscape architectural theory and allied subjects as a way to understand the discipline’s themes, ambitions and practices from the turn of the twentieth century to the present. Landscape architecture is cultural production, and the development of theories within the discipline cannot be separated from the debates, events and values of society at large. By putting forward a range of views about topics that have often been taken for granted, the course aims to shift discussion away from assumptions and toward questions about the discipline and its possibilities.

Landscape Materials, Assemblies, Techniques offers an introduction to a palette of typical building materials used extensively in the crafting of landscape architecture. The material’s historical context, physical properties, manufacturing processes, sustainability, constructability, fabrication, and assemblage will be explored within references to tectonic elements such as floor, column, wall, and roof. The lectures will be structured around isolating one or two materials and exploring their possibilities in landscape elements through various examples of built work. The course also includes the communicative aspect of the detail through various drawing techniques and drawing conventions. Lectures will be supplemented with site visits to built work to gain a deeper understanding of the physicality of ideas presented in class.

Landscape Ecology introduces students to the principles of landscape and urban ecology, the concept of scale, and urban forest as a backbone of green infrastructure. The course focuses on the urban environment, emphasizing urban trees, their ecology and functions, their growing environment, and their ability to thrive or not in urban areas. Ecological concepts and methods, necessary to understand an urban site's environmental and vegetation characteristics, are explored through lectures and case study examples. Through the field assignments and case study examples, students learn how urban land uses, site and landscape design impact and define urban forest structure, composition, diversity, and functions.

Landscape Ecology II builds on the ecological principles, concepts, and tools introduced as part of the Landscape Ecology I. The course focuses on the broader landscape scale and covers topics such as environmental characteristics of a landscape and a site, native and anthropogenic soils, native vegetation and plant communities, vegetation disturbance and dynamics. The course examines ecological methods and tools for assessing and evaluating landscapes and their vegetation. It also introduces topics relevant to spatial conservation and restoration planning, landscape and green systems planning, climate change, sustainability and resilience. Through the field assignments and case study examples, students critically interpret a site within the contents of the natural environment and a broader landscape scale. Using the case study site, they provide ecological reasonings for conservation and restoration of native vegetation, suggest landscape advances to strengthen connectivity, reduce fragmentation, and restore ecological functions.

Introduces hydrological systems as they relate to landscape architecture, in consideration of watersheds, regions, and environmental development.

Continues to introduce the technical skills necessary to mitigate the impacts of development on the natural hydrologic cycle and integrate the fundamentals of hydrology to site design. This course differs from other hydrology courses through the design intervention perspective.