SELECT RECENT TEACHING
Sensing the Built Environment through Time
What is the relationship between vision, sound, smell, taste and touch, and the built environment? How have people perceived, experienced, and as a result used, their environment over time, and how have they designed their environment as a result of, or for specific sensual experience? How has sensual perception and experience been a critical source for design interventions? In this seminar class we will address these and other questions that revolve around the five+ senses using a variety of interpretative media.
In 1961 the Canadian landscape architect Michael Hough asserted, “… there is a desperate need to create new spaces where the senses may be revived.” He considered it the “responsibility of landscape architecture to revitalize the dormant senses, and teach people to see and enjoy their surroundings through them.” While taste, smell, sound, and touch still often fall behind vision when it comes to the design of our built environment, they are more pertinent than we might think at first sight.
In this seminar course we will explore how over the last two centuries sense-making practices have changed the design and perception of the built environment, and vice versa how the built environment has changed how we make sense of it.
Histories and Theories of Landscape and Environment
This lecture course introduces students to relevant topics, themes, and sites that help us understand the conception, production, evolution, and reception of designed and found landscapes throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It aims at building an understanding of landscapes as both physical spaces and as cultural media and constructions that sit at the nexus between art and science and that contribute knowledge about humankind’s relationship with non-human nature. Landscapes are the result of social, political, artistic and intellectual endeavors. The topography, soil and climate of a site also condition its design, use and habitation. As much as designed and found landscapes are a product of their time, they have also contributed to shaping history, both through their physical materiality and through the mental worlds they enable. Embedding found and designed landscapes into their social, political and cultural contexts, the course also pays close attention to the role of expert knowledge and the professions that have contributed to creating them. The course explores the various tensions and relationships embodied, created and represented by designed landscapes; the tensions between nature and culture, practice and use, design and reception, the visual reception of landscapes and their inhabitation, and site-specificity and purposefully “international” design expressions. Using a variety of sources including texts, illustrations, and film the course offers insights into the development and transfer of ideas between different cultures, countries and geographical regions, and time periods.
Forest Grove Tree Planting Urban Landscapes
Discussions about the urban forest and tree canopy, carbon sequestration, sustainability, and tree adoption programs are becoming more prevalent by the day. In this lecture course we will look at the evolution of this green heritage in our designed landscapes. The course deals with the tree landscapes of a variety of scales, and explores the different meanings and functions that these landscapes and their designs have embodied at different moments of time. From a single tree, to tree rows, clumps, grids, quincunx, groves, woods, and forests, trees have been dominant features in our designed landscapes for millennia. Trees have been planted and uprooted to stake out territory and create place, and they have been used to forge and obscure identities. They have provided sustenance and essential building and design materials. They have been the origin and subject of myths and legends, and of war and peace. They have inspired artists, musicians, architects, designers, gardeners, and scientists, and they are what many designed landscapes are made of. More recently, trees like other plants, have been shown to be intelligent, and there is now also greater acceptance of longstanding indigenous beliefs in the agency and rights of trees and nature more generally.
Super Landscapes
Super Sports
As a form of play, sports are deeply embedded in human nature and culture. Throughout history, physical exercise has had considerable impact on how we design and understand landscapes. Vice versa, designed and pre-modern “natural” landscapes have contributed to the formation and development of new sports activities, cultures of movement and the body. With the development of new sports and their increasing commodification, new types of landscapes continue to be created across the globe, invariably transforming our living environment in the process.
In this seminar we will explore the design of different sport landscapes over time and how they have given expression to various understandings of nature and culture. What are the relationships between sport landscapes and their environment? What is the relationship between the site itself and the culture of sports embedded within it? How have sport landscapes, like the activities and their cultures, been tools for colonization? How do they embody constructions of race, place, gender, and identity? How have body and movement cultures, and the public health movement shaped sport landscapes? And vice versa, how have landscapes and the ideas of landscape shaped the specific sports grounds?