1st Edition
Designing Landscape Architectural Education Studio Ecologies for Unpredictable Futures
No single project or endeavour is immune to the issues that the climate crisis brings. The climate crisis encompasses a broad register of "symptoms" – increased global temperatures and sea-level rise, droughts and extreme bushfire events, salinification and desertification of fertile land, and the list goes on. It reveals and amplifies complex causal relationships that are inherently present and traverse scales, sectors and communities divulging a range of impacts and inequalities. This publication asks designers and academic practitioners to describe their own work through an ecological lens, and then to articulate design approaches for developing new practices in landscape architecture teaching.
Designing Landscape Architectural Education: Studio Ecologies for Unpredictable Futures, the Landscape Architecture Design Studio Companion, serves as a resource for academic practitioners in the preparation and delivery of "design-research studios" and students seeking guidance for design methodologies as a part of their landscape architectural education. It draws on the manifold issues of the climate crisis as a set of drivers to examine the utilisation of a range of innovative design approaches to address the current and future priorities of the discipline.
The landscape architecture discipline is evolving rapidly to respond to both a broadening and intensification of changes in the environmental, social and political conditions. These changing conditions require innovation that extend the core competencies of landscape architects. This book addresses two fundamental questions – what are the design competencies required of landscape architects to equip them to deal with the complexities brought forth by contemporary society, and as a result, how could we design the future design studio?
Foreword
Charles Waldheim
Preface
Rosalea Monacella and Bridget Keane
Studio Ecologies
Rosalea Monacella and Bridget Keane
Part 1: Material Ecologies
1. The Anthropocene Chamber: A Pedagogic Experiment in Climate Change Communication
Rania Ghosn
2. Think Like a River: Designing from the Riparian Zone
Jane Mah Hutton
3. Edible Ecologies
Zaneta Hong
4. Conversation with Formafantasma
Rosalea Monacella, Bridget Keane and Simone Farresin
5. Shifting Grounds / Curating Creative Instabilities in Design Studio Pedagogy
Chris Reed
6. Climate Core: A Roadmap for Climate Education in the Built Environment
Jesse M. Keenan
Part 2: Generative Lineages
7. Hope in Restless Pedagogy
Rosetta Elkin
8. A Conversation about Language
Teresa Gali Izard, Luke Harris, Cara Turett, and Bonnie Kate Walker
9. Conversation with Nina-Marie Lister
Rosalea Monacella, Bridget Keane and Nina-Marie Lister
10. Experimental studio ecologies: A productive throwntogetherness
Ed Wall & Alexis Liu
11. Adapting practice for the future of landscape-driven urban design
Anya Domlesky
12. Frames and fictions: Designing a Green New Deal studio sequence
Billy Fleming
13. Conversation with Kate Orff
Rosalea Monacella, Bridget Keane and Kate Orff
Part 3: Processes of Fieldwork
14. Tales from the Dark Side of the City.
Unknown Fields (Kate Davies & Liam Young)
15. Climate Inquiries from Arctic Fieldwork
Leena Cho
16. Conversation with Peter Del Tredici
Rosalea Monacella, Bridget Keane and Peter Del Tredici
17. Framing futures: Worldbuilding in landscape studios.
Marc Miller
18. Finding Landscape through Curiosity.
Sean Burkholder
19. In situ/ex situ: Geometries of density and spectra
James Melsom
Part 4: Sensing Landscapes
20. Computing with nature: Digital design methodologies across scales.
Pia Fricker
21. Envisioning the planetary: Design agency in the climate crisis
Clara Oloriz Sanjuan & Jose Alfredo Ramírez
22. A Sensed Landscape.
Craig Douglas
23. Conversation with Bradley Cantrell.
Rosalea Monacella, Bridget Keane and Bradley Cantrell
24. Architecture of Ecological Attunement: Environment Form and Feedback
Dana Cupkova
25. From Grain to the Territory
Ana Abram & Maj Plamenitas
26. Longitudinal Landscapes
Justine Holzman
Part 5: Expanded Ecologies
27. Asymmetries and urbanization
Elisa Cristiana Cattaneo
28. The Territory as a subject
Paola Viganò
29. Relational Urbanism: Expanded ecologies for a capital earth system.
Enriqueta Llabres-Valls, Sheng-Yang Huang & Zach Fluker
30. Conversation with Jennifer Deger.
Rosalea Monacella, Bridget Keane and Jennifer Deger
31. Attune and entangle: Designing multispecies relations for the sixth extinction
Michael Ezban
32. Ecology and two thesis lab cases.
Roberto Pasini
33. From "Gutter to Gulf" to the ’Glades: A Decade of Urban Landscape Climate Resilience Studios at the University of Toronto 2008–2018
Fadi Masoud, Elise Shelley and Jane Wolff
Conclusion: Tending Towards a Matter of (Ethics of Ground)
Rosalea Monacella and Bridget Keane
Biography
Rosalea Monacella is a faculty member of the Landscape Architecture Program at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Her expertise is in the careful indexing and shifting of dynamic resource flows that inform the landscape of the city. Her design research practice explores the notion of the "thickened ground" through a careful and rigorous investigation of an expanded ecology of economic, ecological and social systems that shape the metabolic and material flows of the city. Speculating on alternative near-future cities and how they might respond to climate change, changing resource flows and ecologies of energy.
Bridget Keane is a lecturer in the Landscape Architecture programme at RMIT University. As a landscape architect/academic, her research and practice are concerned with landscape as a dynamic material system and considers ways in which global systems impact local landscapes through speculating on alternate futures of how we might live in response to issues of climate change, ecologies of waste and the effects of extractive industries.
"Where has this collection been? The provocative voices gathered here offer both comprehensive and timely strategies for landscape architectural education yet to be presented together.
Expansive yet precise, the authors—who represent a variety of disciplines and fields— deftly entangle intellectual frameworks with innovative studio pedagogies that engage the challenges and opportunities of the climate crisis. This body of design studio research will surely catalyze new modes of action by both academics and professionals that focus on making a just and healthy world, not simply saving it."
Julia Czerniak, Professor of Architecture, Syracuse University; Creative Director, CLEAR RLA ASLA
"This book is a milestone in the world of landscape architecture education. Our planet is experiencing rapid change, and scant lessons can actually be gleaned from history at this stage. The question is rather how to direct studio teaching towards the unknown in a decisive and proactive way. With a broad array of experts in ecology, plant physiology, materials, sensing and digital processes, this reader offers design solace in an unforeseeable age."
Christophe Girot, Professor of Landscape Architecture, ETH Univeristy Zurich
"At this fluid moment when we are contemplating the future of education in landscape architecture, this collection provides a rich and provocative field of approaches on which to draw. While apparently anachronistic in the 21st Century research university, studios are represented in their flexible ability to address complex issues across geography and society. We need this collective reflection to shore up our commitment to the studio form as well as to explore tomorrow’s problems."
Professor Elizabeth Mossop, Dean, Faculty of Design Architecture and Building, University of Technology Sydney
"This rigorously organized yet wonderfully diverse book is a resource for academic practitioners in creating new design studio pedagogies to address the symptoms and systems of the climate crisis and an unpredictable future. For students, it reveals insight into potential learning tools and methodologies. Thirty-three contributions are organized around five ‘threads’ of inquiry, which build an ethical momentum underpinned by new values."
Alex Wall, Design Critic in Landscape Architecture, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University
