Proseminar in Landscape Architecture

“Landscapes can be deceptive. Sometimes a landscape seems to be less a setting for the life of its inhabitants than a curtain behind which their struggles, achievements and accidents take place."
        -‘A Fortunate Man’ by John Berger, (1969)

This course provides a weekly joint forum for post-professional landscape architecture students (MLA II) in their first semester at the GSD to introduce the mastery of landscape architecture and to discuss and explore contemporary themes, questions and issues surrounding the landscape field. It will introduce current teaching and research carried out by GSD faculty and other researchers and prepare class members to explore and develop their own intellectual projects and research interests while at the GSD and to articulate positions from the field of landscape architecture in their design studios and other course work.

Individual and collective inquiries into the discipline of landscape architecture are based upon readings in the English language by a range of authors, critical analysis of current landscape architectural ideas and projects, and talks and discussion given by the faculty of the Department of Landscape Architecture and GSD guests in class. Presentations will be given addressing matters in design education, criticism, design practices and interdisciplinarity in the contemporary landscape field. Through assigned weekly short readings, written responses and a final in-class research presentation the course seeks to deepen the student's understanding of the aesthetic, ecological, social, environmental, multi-disciplinary, cultural, ethical and political context(s) of landscape architecture.

This course will meet for the first time on Wednesday, September 7th.