Poetics of Planting Design II

Note regarding new course offering: Course SCI-6456 will be changed to SCI-06460 AFTER THE LIMITED ENROLLMENT LOTTERY IS DONE. Students interested in this course may select 6456 in the lottery, and they will be enrolled or wait listed into 6460.

Poetics of Planting Design is a workshop-based seminar that investigates a range of compositional, spatial, and experiential possibilities of plants as a design medium in landscape architecture. There will be an emphasis and examination of the works of the 20th Century landscape architect A.E. Bye, notably examples that assimilate plant form, geomorphology and phenomenological characteristics. The seminar will include a series of Plant Design Colloquia with landscape architects whose work is emphatically expressed through planting design, and field trips around the Cambridge area. The course will culminate in a rigorous investigations of a design exploring the spatial choreography between a particular plant species, the potentialities of the species-form, and topography. The course expectation is that the students will develop a critical and visual language for the use of plants in design, encompassing spatial and temporal relationships, from the ephemeral to the successional.