Environmental Readings

A long, deep green thread exists in American literature from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman through Herman Melville and William Carlos Williams on to Terry Tempest Williams and Wendell Berry. This literature has influenced how we perceive our environments and, in the process, many planners, designers, and conservationists such as Frederick Law Olmsted, Jane Addams, Aldo Leopold, Lewis Mumford, Ian McHarg, and Anne Whiston Spirn. In this seminar, we will explore this green thread and analyze its influence on how we shape our environments through design and planning. The course has three parts. Throughout, the influence of literature on design and planning theory will be explored. The first part will focus on the three most important theorists in environmental planning and landscape architecture: Frederick Law Olmsted Sr., Charles Eliot, and Ian McHarg. The senior Olmsted pretty much created the field of landscape architecture, adapting the English landscape aesthetic for the rapidly urbanizing North American continent to address pressing urban issues. Arguably, the planning profession in the United States also began with the senior Olmsted. Charles Eliot was a protégé of Olmsted?s. Eliot pioneered the use of comprehensive, scientific landscape inventories; originated the concept of land trusts; and designed the first metropolitan regional open-space plan. Educated in landscape architecture and city planning, Ian McHarg influenced both fields in the late twentieth century. He urged us to better understand natural processes and how people use space. The second part of the course will critically explore current theories in environmental planning and landscape architecture. The topics will include: frameworks for cultural landscape studies, the future of the vernacular, ecological design and planning, sustainable and regenerative design, the languages of landscapes, and evolving views of landscape aesthetics and ethics. In the third part of the course, students will build on the readings to develop their own theory for ecological planning or, alternatively, landscape architecture. While literacy and critical inquiry are addressed throughout the course, critical thinking is especially important for this final section.