Course Description
Concepts of environmental and community engagement with emphasis on potential of landscape architecture to act as liaison and operative framework. Projects selected to engage contemporary, critical issues in marginal locations at several scales, ranging from ecological urbanism to site and system-specific details.
Additional Requirements for Graduate Students:
Graduate students are expected to serve as leaders within the studio and demonstrate their leadership during group project assignments. Graduate students will be expected to demonstrate this leadership by being the project manager for the first phase of the group design project (developing the scope of the project).
For all required coursework, the quality of graduate student work is expected to demonstrate excellence and greater depth in design thinking and theory, design fundamentals, graphic communication, and written description/explanation.
This additional work may vary depending on the semester's projects, but typically, graduate students will be required to complete two additional projects related to the group project. The first involves summarizing and editing the project work for a final public presentation. The second is to develop a descriptive "how-to" guide for a community engagement technique that the group employed.
Athena Title
Landscape Studio Engagement
Equivalent Courses
Not open to students with credit in LAND 5050S or LAND 7050S
Corequisite
EDES 7550
Semester Course Offered
Offered fall
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Student learning Outcomes
- Students will understand current theories and concepts of environmental and community engagement in landscape architecture.
- Students will understand systems theories related to environmental and community dynamics.
- Students will understand contemporary systems urbanisms, including new urbanism, landscape urbanism, and ecological urbanism.
- Students will understand the role and potential for infrastructure and frameworks to act as leveraging devices in design.
- Students will have the capability to utilize system dynamics to inform site scales in landscape and urban design.
- Students will be able to engage community and stakeholder liaisons and to utilize sensitive research methodologies.
- Students will be able to conduct intensive landscape assessments of ecological, cultural, and aesthetic systems and sites.
- Students will have the confidence to use generative techniques to derive landscape ability to develop concepts and designs which incorporate intentional symbolism and meaning.
- Students will have a sense of the importance of symbolism—implied and explicit— in landscape architectural design.
- Students will have an appreciation for the multiple values, needs, and preferences held by pubic-oriented landscape architecture.
- Students will have a regard for the role and potential of synthesis as design driver in landscape architecture.
Topical Outline
- This course applies a project-driven studio format with integrated lectures, seminars, and workshops on relevant concepts, skills, and techniques. Advanced application of foundational skills and methods is expected in order to develop strategies and designs for complex issues and sites. Critical course components include topical research, class discussions on assigned readings, site visits, stakeholder engagement, and progress and juried project critiques.
- Course and Project Schedule:
Week 1 – 4: Understanding Systems – Instrumental Mapping
- Week 5 – 10: Nested Scales – Leverages and Linkages
- Week 11 – 16: Engaging Site – Strategies and Forms
- Projects will apply these course-acquired skillsets to the design of a real-world site in Georgia in service to actual clients. Students will gain experience in working with clientele while providing Georgia citizens/businesses/communities with implementable deliverables.
