Second Semester Core: Landscape Architecture Design
GSD 1112, Spring, with Holly Clarke, Virginia Johnson

This course is the second of a four-semester core sequence of landscape design and planning studios. In this semester, students expand their previous investigations into a more complex site and set of design problems. The studio is arranged into a series of independent but related exercises of increasing scale and varying relationships within the context of a university campus. In this design process, natural, temporal, and cultural phenomena inflects program, spatial configuration, and materials. Particular emphasis is placed on topographic manipulations and the use of vegetation as a tool of design. The studio seeks to relate subject matter and technique with courses in technology, planting design, drawing, and history.

Third Semester Core: Planning and Design of Landscapes
GSD 1211, Fall
with Scheri Fultineer, Nicholas Pouder, Carl Steinitz, Niall Kirkwood

This course reinforces and builds upon the range of conventions of landscape architectural production introduced in previous core studios and academic courses. Emphasis is placed on precision and craft in conceptual, schematic, and design development abilities. Issues of the physical, socioeconomic, technological, architectural, and ideological forces underlying the organization and form of human communities are incorporated into a series of projects. These range from the complex reading and mapping of the city, the development and testing of innovative program strategies in unconventional sites, and the development of design ideas to the advanced schematic stage. At each stage, students are expected to reconcile the sometimes conflicting characteristics among land resources, development pressures, privacy, and commonality. Throughout, a strong reciprocity between depth of thinking and the act of making is sought.

Objectives:

1. To gain a critical understanding of the issues, influences, and generative possibilities in landscape design and planning within the contemporary urban environment.
    
2. To provide a bridge between the concerns of landscape theory and individual design practices. The need for a theoretical basis for action within the shifting and complex nature of the communities we form and inhabit will be explored. Investigations of the nature, meaning, and social role of public and private spatial orders will be examined.
    
3. To identify concerns for human settlement within the dynamics of urban ecology. The processes of growth, transformation, and the complex layering of ownership, density, distribution, and territoriality will be explored.
    
4. To develop and refine both analytical and analogical skills in the interpretation, representation, and production of landscape architectural design and planning.

Instructors
Each studio critic works directly with a small group of students for the duration of the semester. A combination of faculty, practicing landscape architects and visiting critics are selected each semester.

Fourth Semester Core: Planning and Design of Landscapes
GSD 1212, Spring 2005
with Alan Berger, Holly Clarke

The fourth of the four-term sequence of landscape design and planning studios develops the design concepts introduced in the first year and applies them to landscape site design problems of increased scale and programmatic complexity. A site within an urbanized context is used as the locus for the design studio. A series of incremental design exercises introduces and critically analyzes contemporary site design practices. These are followed by the design and development of a public landscape comprising of residential, commercial, and civic open spaces.