Topics in Theory and Design

These advanced seminars explore ideas in contemporary landscape architectural design and theory. A special link is made between the analysis of built work and text to design practice and the making of projects. Topics include the intersections of art, nature and creativity; practices of analysis and criticism; ideas of urbanism and infrastructure; collaborative ventures and cross-disciplinarily; vision and visuality; and representational structures, both verbal and visual. These courses fulfill the Landscape Architecture Theory III requirement and are open to all interested Weitzman students.

This fall, students will engage the multi-temporal conditions of landscapes by way of on-site exploratory surveys motivated by curiosity, rigor and craft in Field|Work: Physical Explorations of Landscape Temporality, led by Associate Proffessor, Sean Burkholder. The class will be organized around four weekend fieldwork trips across the region allowing students to plan for, and then respond to, the decisions they make while on site in an attempt to capture the temporal qualities of those landscapes. Motivating this work is a belief that on-site fieldwork remainsan essential component of landscape analysis and creativity, and is fundamental to the design process, not something that augments it. The class will take as a starting prompt that the potential-rich plurality of times is one of the defining features of landscape. Working methods will be largely lens-based (photo/video/drone) but others will be introduced and explored.