Landscape Architecture is a discipline that is defined by an environment that is constantly changing, and yet our tools for drawing and dimensioning landscape typically focus on elements that are static. This course will explore ways to engage the subtle and fleeting elements of nature that define our experience of being outside, through techniques for directly observing and visualizing how things change. This course will be a practical and conceptual exploration of time-based observation and both hand and digital drawing workflows. Students will be introduced to methods for observing motion and change using time lapse photo, video, and high-speed cameras, as well as techniques for extracting information from images using motion-interpretation software, grasshopper, and runway, and simple animation techniques using Adobe Premiere. 

Elective

In this seminar, students will be asked to explore how their practices- as artists and designers- can engage issues of land and water justice. Research will happen through local field trips, community willow weaving workshops, readings, conversations with artists and activists, and speculative and creative practices. Some of the questions we will ask in the seminar include: How do our actions and our lives change when we understand land and water as a system of relationships and obligations? How can we, as artists and designers, develop a creative practice that pushes back against the privatization and financialization of land, water and relationships? How can our practices respond to and challenge a singular narrative of progress and development and create hybrid practices that weave tradition with speculative futures? How can critical spatial practice be used to uncover the multiple and complex histories of place, unsettle the comforts of modernity, and contribute to struggles for decolonization and justice? The hope is that this will be a truly multidisciplinary seminar and have students from across all the divisions. Each student will develop a final project that resonates with the seminar’s core themes and is also relevant to their own interests, goals, media and creative practice.

Autumn Site works is a grounded, creative space for a more attentive and reciprocal relationship between people and local biodiversity. Our weekly classroom will be an outdoor test plot at RISD’s Tillinghast Farm, where we will listen to visiting speakers, tend to plants and soil with our hands, and draw our close attention to the many life forms, forces, and surprises in the landscape. Each student will have the creative freedom to design an experimental land-based practice, installation, or event within the plot. Our work will be respectful of diverse ethics, from climate resilience to symbiosis and beauty. However, our learning direction will be focused on topics like the labor of caring for a landscape rich with relationships, local material sourcing for habitat creation, and community stewardship building.

Estimated Materials Cost: $100.00

Elective

Spring Site works is a grounded, creative space for a more attentive and reciprocal relationship between people and local biodiversity. Our weekly classroom will be an outdoor test plot at RISD’s Tillinghast Farm, where we will listen to visiting speakers, tend to plants and soil with our hands, and draw our close attention to the many life forms, forces, and surprises in the landscape. Each student will have the creative freedom to design an experimental land-based practice, installation, or event within the plot. Our work will be respectful of diverse ethics, from climate resilience to symbiosis and beauty. However, our learning direction will be focused on topics like the labor of caring for a landscape rich with relationships, local material sourcing for habitat creation, and community stewardship building.

Elective

It is estimated that since the early 1600’s, colonists and immigrants to the portion of North America known as the United States, had filled in half of all wetland habitat by the mid-1800’s, and had hunted wetland creating beavers nearly to extinction by the early 1900’s. The land bears witness to that legacy today. In this field-oriented seminar we will spend class time within these important and varied habitats, learning to see the legacy and agency beavers and plants have had in forming wetlands and supporting their biological diversity.

Wetlands are a broad habitat type that hold water on the land, hydrate soils, provide essential areas for wildlife, and support unique vegetative communities. However, the cultural legacy of viewing marshes and swamps as wasteland has, and continues, to result in the degradation and destruction of many freshwater wetlands. 

Through field immersion, students will learn to see the landscape for the evidence it holds of what wetland habitat once was. They will identify wetland plant species and become intimately familiar with the water and soil that support these plant species. Extensive reading will support field observations, lectures, and conversation. The policies that brought about wetland destruction as well as more recent protections, will be topics covered. We will also look at the science behind the ability of wetlands to store carbon and water with the potential of ameliorating on-going climate changes.

Final projects for this class will offer students an opportunity to explore how their studio work can inform others of the salient aspects of these watery worlds. 

Estimated Cost of Materials: $75.00

Elective

This seminar explores the parallels between designing and constructing the ground. It's focus is on landform - analyzing it as part of a larger natural system; understanding its inherent opportunities and limitations; altering it for human use & occupation; and building it with varying construction methodologies. The means for this exploration will primarily be through three-dimensional representations with two dimensional contour plans; however, diagrams, sketches, sections, and narratives will be necessary throughout the semester.

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Landscape Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | MLA-I, MLA-II Landscape Architecture

As the scope and objectives of the design disciplines expand and diversify, the ability to implement effective research methodologies has become increasingly critical to position designers to generate and validate new knowledge. This course will survey research methods relevant to the design disciplines that have emerged from the sciences, the social sciences and the arts with special focus on those utilized by landscape architects. Methods we will examine include case studies, descriptive strategies, classification schemes, interpretive strategies, evaluation and diagnosis, engaged action research, projective design and arts-based practices. Students will work individually and in teams to analyze and compare different research strategies, understand their procedures and sequences, the types of data required, projected outcomes, and value by examining a set of projects of diverse scales. Visiting lecturers will present research based design projects. The goal of the course is to provide students with a framework of research methodologies with which they can begin to build their own research based practices.

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Landscape Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | MLA-I, MLA-II Landscape Architecture

As the scope and objectives of the design disciplines expand and diversify, the ability to implement effective research methodologies has become increasingly critical to position designers to generate and validate new knowledge. This course will survey research methods relevant to the design disciplines that have emerged from the sciences, the social sciences and the arts with special focus on those utilized by landscape architects. Methods we will examine include case studies, descriptive strategies, classification schemes, interpretive strategies, evaluation and diagnosis, engaged action research, projective design and arts-based practices. Students will work individually and in teams to analyze and compare different research strategies, understand their procedures and sequences, the types of data required, projected outcomes, and value by examining a set of projects of diverse scales. Visiting lecturers will present research based design projects. The goal of the course is to provide students with a framework of research methodologies with which they can begin to build their own research based practices.

Majors are pre-registered for this course by the department. Enrollment is limited to Landscape Architecture Students.

Major Requirement | MLA-I, MLA-II Landscape Architecture