Alternative Landscapes
For students in Sean Burkholder’s landscape architecture studios, comics are a vehicle for deeply-researched responses to environmental urgencies.
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This story is part of a series of stories published for Weitzman News, the School's weekly e-mail update, in conjunction with centennial of the Department of Landscape Architecture, which will be celebrated on September 26 and 27 at Landscape Futures.
Sean Burkholder, the Andrew Gordon Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Weitzman School and co-director of the Environmental Modeling Lab at The Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism & Ecology, has an idea that he tries to impress on students.
“Landscapes aren’t places,” he says. “They’re events.”
Rather than a static set of physical conditions, landscapes are “the product of a whole series of interconnected events and agendas”—geological, climatic, political, social, and cultural. Not even the end product of those occurrences, in fact, so much as one phase in an ongoing process. Florida’s Lake Okeechobee, a 700-square-mile freshwater lake at the top of the Everglades, is one example: A place that looks natural, but is actually the result of decades of human manipulation that could have happened in a different way.
“The South Florida we know right now is nothing more than a product of a giant plumbing operation, due largely to a couple of hurricanes in the 1920s,” Burkholder says. “If those weather events had not occurred, the whole landscape would look really different.”
Last semester, Burkholder led an option studio that asked students to reimagine the present landscape of Lake Okeechobee by speculatively changing some events of the past. The studio was called “The Big O: Designing Speculative Pasts, Imagining Lacustrine Futures.” While many studio exercises, particularly in landscape architecture, involve projecting designs into the future, Burkholder instead asked students to reimagine the present by changing the past. That helped mitigate the utopian impulse—the common urge to imagine that design will help create a future that is better than the present—and it required a much more granular understanding of how the present came to be the way it is.
“It requires a really deep dive into a place,” Burkholder says. “It actually requires students to do more research on a site than they would ever normally do.”
As part of the studio, students traveled to Florida’s Lake Okeechobee, a 700-square-mile freshwater lake at the top of the Everglades—a place that looks natural, but is actually the result of decades of human manipulation. (Photo Sean Burkholder)
Students spent the first portion of the semester learning about counterfactual speculation techniques, developing alternative versions of the present stemming from divergence points from history as it actually occurred. They visited Lake Okeechobee in the middle of the semester. And they spent the final portion of the semester crafting comic book-style narratives and designing physical landscapes that reflected speculative alterations to the region’s history. The comic-narrative method was intended to help students incorporate the dimension of time in their designs in ways that traditional design products don’t emphasize.
“I’ve never made a comic. I don’t think I ever thought I would make a comic,” says Caroline Schoeller (MLA’24), a student in the Big O studio who now works as a landscape designer in Denver. “As a storytelling method, I think it was really powerful.”
Schoeller’s project focused on the sugar industry in South Florida. Residents of the area have claimed that burning sugarcane has harmed air quality in the region. The industry has protected its right to burn sugar, but Schoeller speculated about how the landscape could have been changed if different laws had been put in place in the 1990s, generating money from sugar companies for community projects. Schoeller designed an island in the town of Pahokee that would create environmental benefits for wildlife and recreational space for residents.
“In the past they’ve come up with a lot of different plans to create this island eco-hub that would bring economic vitality to the town,” Schoeller says. “I was looking at what were different decisions in the past that could have changed to lead it to actually happening.”
Dams are among the most visible of the human interventions that have shaped the South Florida landscape, which students interrogated using comics. Site visits provided the opportunity to meet local land managers, observe wildlife in their habitat, and sketch. (Photo Sean Burkholder)
In her alternate present, the companies still burn sugarcane. Residents visit the island to enjoy a respite from air-quality issues, but also to take in the dramatic sunsets produced by smoke from the burning.
“You’re not creating a better or worse landscape. You’re just creating something different,” Schoeller says. “It was really helpful as a way of reflecting and seeing how important different players are in the design process. One political decision might lead to a totally new future.”
Burkholder has incorporated the graphic novel format into studios at Weitzman since introducing visual storyboard narratives into the first-year design studio he has taught regularly since 2019. For this studio, two Philadelphia-based comic-book artists, Kelly Phillips and Robert Berry, helped students work through the techniques of graphic storytelling. The students say it was drawing-intensive. They still had to develop some of the same site plans and renderings they would in a typical studio, but now those were one aspect of a panel that also included imagined characters and events unfolding over time.
“It was a lot of work,” acknowledges Maura McDaniel (MLA’24), now working as a landscape designer in Minneapolis. But the counterfactual aspect of the exercise made it easier, in some ways. And, McDaniel says, it changed the stakes of the practice. She based her project around Kreamer Island, imagining that the people who once inhabited the island had developed a series of concrete domes to protect their homes against extreme weather and flooding. In the alternate timeline, those structures might have helped them last on the island a little bit longer, but not forever. She designed an island that built on the presence of those concrete domes as habitat for attracting fish, for recreation and commerce.
“No one was presenting a project that was like, this one landscape is going to solve all the lake’s problems,” McDaniel says. “It was helpful to not feel that burden of thinking about how you can solve everything in a semester.”
For Burkholder, who developed the studio in conjunction with the research for his forthcoming book, Lakemaker: Plans, Practices, and Politics of Holding Water, counterfactual speculation is a way of better integrating landscape design with other systems and disciplines. Understanding how landscapes came to be, and how they might have been different, can help designers think more collaboratively and strategically, he says.
“We still want the future to be better than the present,” Burkholder says, who, in his professional practice, has worked extensively with the Army Corps of Engineers to protect coastal communities along the Great Lakes. “But if you put people in a different present, they’ll imagine a different future collectively, versus just showing people your five versions of the future and having them pick one.”
Editor’s Note: Work by students in Burkholder’s Spring 2024 studio, The Big O: Designing Speculative Pasts, Imagining Lacustrine Futures, is featured in the virtual gallery for the 2024 Year End Show.
