Design Workshop Studios
This spring, we are offering five design workshop studios for advanced BLA and MLA students. Each of these courses connects directly to the mission of our department and the research and outreach activities of the faculty members leading them.
Depave Un-Design Workshop
In Depave Un-Design Workshop, led by Prof. Mary Pat McGuire, students are studying asphalt sites, parking lots, vacant lots, streets, sidewalks, and industrial corridors in Chicago in order to design depaving interventions and develop planning and policy recommendations that take zoning, land-use regulations, imperviousness, and community-based organizing into account.
Place Wisdom: Culture, Ecology, and Time
Place Wisdom: Culture, Ecology, and Time, led by Prof. Beth Scott, is challenging students to develop hybrid forms of landscape representation that relate interwoven settlement histories in places structured by long-lived ecological processes. Building on their research, students will then propose resilient, sustainable, and/or climate-adaptive landscape interventions in which site-scale design responds to complex system dynamics.
Campus as Living Laboratory: Design-Build for the University Arboretum
In Campus as Living Laboratory: Design-Build for the University Arboretum, led by Prof. Brian Deal, students are collaborating to design, detail, and install a new landscape feature within the University Arboretum using the Miyawaki method for planting and early establishment. Through site analysis and regular consultations with Arboretum staff members, the location for the intervention will be selected by students early in the semester, and installation will take place in its final weeks. Beyond the semester, the work will be monitored to determine its success relative to key performance targets.
Shaping Comfort: Designing Microclimates for Inviting Outdoor Spaces
In Shaping Comfort: Designing Microclimates for Inviting Outdoor Spaces, led by Prof. Zhihan Tao, students are exploring the mechanisms of outdoor microclimates and the principles for creating comfortable environments through landscape architecture techniques. To that end, they are engaging with cutting-edge tools, including ENVI-met software for design scenario simulations and detecting instruments for real-world environmental data collection.
Grocery Futures: Food Cultures + Edible Landscapes
Grocery Futures: Food Cultures + Edible Landscapes, led by Prof. Joseph Altshuler, is bringing Architecture and Landscape Architecture students together to partner with HeartStrong Grocery, a local business, future grocery store, and edible landscape coming to Urbana’s North End, the city’s historically Black community and definitionally a food desert. Through design speculation and development, they are envisioning futures in which grocery stores operate as much as civic venues for cultural coexistence and social exchange as for sustenance.
Funding for two of these design workshop studios and our Graduate Site Design studio is being provided through a terrific gift from a university alum with special interests in landscape architecture. Support for our other studios this semester is coming from the Wadsworth Headship Fund, the Brenton and Jean Wadsworth Endowment in Landscape Architecture, and our donors’ generous, ongoing gifts to the Landscape Architecture Executive Fund, 100% of which go to direct support of students. A big thank you to our donors!
