Design Pedagogies for the Planetary Student in Landscape Architecture
Consider landscape architecture graduates in the near future, strategically positioned at critical intersections of systemic change. These graduates emerge from alternative pathways that have expanded the discipline’s approach to professional practice. Planetary Landscape Architecture graduates are deeply inspired to cultivate a world of generosity and hope through which multiple worlds can flourish together within Earth’s interconnected systems. As students and then practitioners, they strive for an equitable and just planetary future.
The planetary world is one that recognizes the Earth as a complex interconnected set of systems composed of multiple worlds and knowledge structures. It is a world that acknowledges diverse cosmologies, temporalities, and more-than-human relations. It is a world that emphasizes ethical responsibilities across boundaries of species, cultures, and geographies, in solidarity with shared environmental challenges. This is the world of the Planetary Student. For that student, the Earth cannot helpfully be regarded as a single, globalized, containable entity with a determinable future.
Future Planetary Landscape Architecture students will embody a pluriversal approach to their discipline, recognising the Earth consists not of a single world, but of many worlds in dynamic relation. These students will be skilled in navigating multiple knowledge systems. For example, they will be able to integrate perspectives from diverse epistemologies, scientific forms of ecological systems justifications, and landscape ethics. Their suite of skills is developed as recognition that no single framework can adequately address complex planetary challenges to which the discipline needs to respond ethically.
This exhibition maps the historical development of design studio pedagogy and approaches embracing pluriversal knowledge integration, cultural interface pedagogy, relational design practices, critical time consciousness, and collaborative design studio ecologies. By juxtaposing these approaches across the Experiments Wall’s dual surfaces, the exhibition reveals both the evolution of design studio pedagogies to date and the future possibilities.
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This exhibition presents a rare, concentrated view of Jon Lott’s architectural practice through the lens of selected physical models. Lott’s practice spans experimental houses, cultural institutions, and public interventions—each exploring the provisional, the adaptive, and what he terms a reflexive formalism. Models Themselves assembles physical models from across this body of work, including projects featured in his forthcoming Park Books publication, Proximities, such as the Brugge Diptych, Haffenden House, Stump House, and Couple-Lean-Tos Presented as the models themselves, each is a scalar rehearsal for what might be. Each reveals proximities between architecture’s parts—wall for a wall, roof for a roof—operating somewhere between representation and description. The exhibition affirms the GSD’s commitment to architecture as a speculative discipline, shaped equally by its built manifestations and the iterative tools that bring them into being. - Jon Lott, Associate Professor of Architecture at the GSD and founding principal of Para Project. Para Project Team Jon Lott Emma Sheffer Nancy Lu Kei Takanami -
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