Rethinking Design Standards: Materials, Details, and Maintenance

3 units

How does the design process account for the temporal nature of constructed landscapes? How should landscape architects practice with the future of their project sites and designs in mind? With the increasingly urgent need to minimize carbon emissions and extraction processes, landscape architects must reevaluate standard practice to consider how their designs are weathering and engaging with local environments over time. Key to this review are material selection, detail design, and maintenance processes, all of which determine a project's sustainability five, 10, or 50 years from when it is originally constructed. In this course, students will be pushed to question the current standards of landscape practice to design for the current moment in climate change and environmental justice. Through lectures, readings and research, students will first gain an understanding of what these standards are and their ultimate weathering processes to then develop their own design proposals and modifications to these standards. Ultimately, design standards become the design project. The course is exploratory and experimental in nature, so students are encouraged to bring their own questions of the profession and research ideas. Master of Landscape Architecture students and Landscape Architecture minors have priority. Students will be registered for the course from the waitlist by the Registrar's Office.