Focuses on site planning and design with an emphasis on parks and open-space systems in the adaptive reuse of urban sites. Projects focus on the creation and cultivation of public space, transformation of site conditions, and development of sustainable site materials. Emphasizes site analysis, development of an individual design process, and design communication strategies. This studio course introduces students to urban design precedents, site research, and remediation methods through case studies, lectures, site visits, and workshops.

ARCH

LARC

Sustainable Urban Site Design

Continues LARC 2130. Focuses on sustainable community/campus/neighborhood design at the intersection of large-scale urban and environmental systems. Primary topics include mixed-use programming in relation to systems ranging from zoning and transit to the material flows of human and wildlife habitats. This studio course introduces basic geographical information systems (GIS) and application of landscape ecology principles. Projects examine the role of landscape systems and the formation and reformulation of land development scenarios.

Designed Urban Ecologies

Addresses fundamental techniques of sustainable site design in the built environment, including earthworks, water, and soils, using current-day storm events. Primary topics include topography, site grading, study models, universal accessibility, and storm water considerations in urban and other built environments. Introduces students to urban tree planting techniques, graphic communications, basic site materials, and construction details.

Introduction to Sustainable Site Planning and Design

Continues LARC 2230. Focuses on construction technologies, methods, and materials for sustainable site elements, including environmental performance infrastructures, circulation systems, and basic site structures. Introduces structural systems for site work via lecture and in-class exercises.

Sustainable Site Construction and Detailing

Seeks to instill basic landscape literacy enabling students to read urban landscapes and recognize different ways of knowing landscapes, including everyday landscapes. Presents key concepts, ethical debates, and iconic works that gave shape to modernism in landscape architecture and urbanism. Focusing on eighteenth-century through mid-twentieth-century projects and designers, examines contextual factors and resulting formal, spatial, organizational, and material characteristics of built works. Using case studies, challenges students to analyze the entangled histories of landscape preservation and urban segregation and to apply theories of environmental ethics and environmental justice to questions about the built environment and the relationship between natural and social systems. Offers students an opportunity to practice formulation of a critical design perspective and landscape interpretation via reading responses, project analysis, written work, podcasts, and StoryMaps.

ENGL

ENGW

Cities, Landscape, and Modern Culture

Presents the core themes, social theories, ethical debates, and iconic works that shape the field of contemporary landscape architecture and urban design, particularly in the context of environmental change and climate disruption. Focuses on contemporary projects and designers to examine formal characteristics of built works and contextual factors, including social, political, and economic systems and institutions. Challenges students to apply theories of environmental and climate justice to questions about the built environment and the relationship between natural and social systems. Designed to prepare students to address complex sociocultural and environmental issues through thoughtful inquiry and creative expression. Offers students an opportunity to formulate critical design perspectives via reading responses, project analyses, written work, and podcasts.

Cities, Landscape, and Contemporary Culture

Uses the study of New England’s plant communities and plant identification as a framework to consider the evolution of the New England landscape from European colonization to the present. Combines field study with lectures and class discussion. Human activity, land use, and settlement patterns all influence the development of landscape, and our cultural history is expressed in the species demographics, land forms, and ecosystem dynamics of our environment.

Plants, People, and Landscape Change

Combines horticultural and ecological field study with studio design exercises to deliver introductory to advanced planting design techniques. Primary topics include how to design phytoremediation strategies for contaminated sites, seasonal planting considerations, strategic phasing, and maintenance techniques. This is a workshop-based course.

Planting Design

Introduces sustainable landscape planning techniques with an emphasis on adaptive urbanism. Key topics include the designed and managed relationship of cities to their regional ecologies, such as sub/urbanized watersheds and coastal zones, as well as the spatial, material, and programmatic roles of environmental infrastructures in the civic landscape. Particularly emphasizes the market-based integration of recreation, transit, food, housing, and industrial networks with living systems such as urban forests, riparian corridors, managed habitats, and constructed wetlands.

Landscape Planning and Urbanism Studio

Offers students an opportunity to design and develop a site or district including all of its requisite systems. Students draw on their landscape architectural education to produce a design both responsive to specific criteria and prototypical of ways to build sustainable and adaptable public landscapes&#8212;often described as &#8220;resilience.&#8221; Projects are expected to respond to and integrate their contexts (urban, environmental, climatic, and economic); meet spatial, performative, and programmatic requirements and technical demands (materials, implementation and management strategies); and dynamic processes at play within and around the project site.

SUEN

Comprehensive Design Studio

Introduces fundamental-to-advanced concepts in the field of landscape and urban ecology. Focuses on the landscape-scale spatial structure, temporal patterns, and geographic ranges produced by the intersection of large-scale environmental and human processes. Emphasizes spatial taxonomies (patch, corridor, mosaic, granularity, edge, ecotone) produced across diverse landscape types influenced by human development and landscape dynamics in the built environment (disturbance, fragmentation, accumulation, and succession). Incorporates basic techniques in geographic-information-system software.

Landscape Ecology

Offers a discussion-based seminar focusing on case studies of influential works in contemporary landscape, urbanism, and sustainable environmental design. Encourages students to seek interdisciplinary perspectives toward development of critical-thinking skills in relation to forces shaping urban environments in contemporary global culture. A diverse range of material from published design criticism to open-source social media engagement provides basis for discussion and written and oral presentations.

Urban Landscape Seminar

Offers a lecture- and case-study-based course focusing on strategic planning, business models, organizational structures, logistics, and regulatory paradigms associated with professional practice in landscape architecture. Core topics provide an overview of common technical and business procedures, including RFQs; RFPs; marketing, public relations, and client management; hiring and human resource management; review board/regulatory boards; permitting; and licensure.

Landscape Architecture