Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning, College of Environmental Design, UC Berkeley

Dr. Hill will present her recent explorations of the potential for urban shorelines to offer a meaningful spectacle of environmental change as an aesthetic experience. She has been testing ideas for sand meganourishment projects to create dynamic urban beaches, and for pier structures to include and reveal habitat stratification along changing shorelines. Examples will be used from Virginia Beach and San Francisco Bay. Hill received her PhD from Harvard and was previously on the faculties of MIT, UW-Seattle, and University of Virginia. She was honored as a Fellow of the Urban Design Institute in New York and conducted research in Stockholm, Sweden as a Fulbright Scholar. Her work addresses urban ecological dynamics in relation to the new challenges associated with climate change. Her book Ecology and Design: Frameworks for Learning was published by Island Press in 2002, and her current book project focuses on adapting urban waterfronts to climate change. Her work in urban design is currently focused on New Orleans, where she is a member of the Dutch-American engineering and design team collaborating with colleagues in The Netherlands to understand coastal sand transport and the potential for lower-cost, dynamic designs to help secure coastal communities as sea levels rise.

There are three studios offered for the Fall 2013 Semester. The studios are available for all 5th year undergraduate students and 3rd year MLA students. Use the studio lottery form and rank your studio choices from 1-3 and forward the form to Kalia Jarvis.

Fall2013 Studio Lottery Form

Parks-R-Us IV, Biloxi Beachfront

Elizabeth Mossop

In this studio we will explore open space design, a typology at the heart of the discipline of landscape architecture. Large complex parks bring together questions of urban design, ecological processes, program and planning with economic, social and cultural issues.  Parks also have a certain programmatic freedom at this scale, which allows a unique form of design exploration through landscape.

This studio will be part of a continuing series focused on large-scale open space design, which has looked at open space in New Orleans, Biloxi, and most recently the waterfront of Lake Ponchartrain. We are going to focus on a specific type of parkland, in this case the beachfront, and look at a project in the center of Biloxi.

We will begin by looking at beachfronts generally, studying international examples as well as making a trip along the Gulf Coast to experience and explore real examples (with enough interest of course I could also be persuaded into a trip to the best beaches in the world in Australia).

In Biloxi we will be partnering with the Gulf Coast Community Design Studio as well as local ecologists and engineers to explore the possibilities for making a more sustainable public beachfront. Our client will be the City of Biloxi and we will we working with their officers and a series of key stakeholders for the duration of the project. We will be working atelier-style, in other words like we would in an office, to develop and test a series of alternatives for the future development of the beachfront.

The studio will combine speculation about the future of Biloxi and exploration of design possibilities with the development of real proposals for the beachfront. In this case the infrastructure of storm protection and beach development will be a key factor.

The studio will focus on issues of landscape performance, metrics for landscape and methods of communication.

National Park Planning With A Cross-Cultural Perspective: China and Alaska

Bruce Sharky

Red Stone National Park, near Chengdu, China

Denali National Park, Alaska

This studio will explore two important design issues:  1. Emerging concepts of what is a national park should be; and 2. cross-cultural attitudes and approaches to national park planning comparing the American and Chinese experience.  The idea is for up to 6 LSU students to travel to China to be involved in field studies and design charrette with their Chinese counterparts in developing a national park master plan for the Red Stone Park located near Chengdu City.  We will travel in mid-September to China and will participate in a two-week long initial site visit to Red Stone Park, work with their Chinese counterparts in developing an initial site analysis, and prepare some initial master planning concepts for the park.  LSU students would then return to Baton Rouge to continue working on developing a schematic master plan for Red Stone Park culminating in a SKYPE facilitated review at the end of the semester and the preparation of a summary master planning document.

The second group of students will focus on the planning and design of a new outdoor visitor facility and backcountry staging area at the Toklat River site.  The site is semi-remote within the Denali National Park situated in the Alaska Mountain Range and foothills of Mt. McKinley (the tallest mountain in North America.  The park is accessible by highway or train; approximately 3 hours drive from Anchorage.  We will be hosted by the Alaska Regional Office of the National Park Service.  Our field trip will include visits to Denali National Park staying in ranger cabins. We will spend several days onsite conducting site studies, documentation, and analysis.  At the end of our stay NPS professional staff will review your preliminary concept plans for the project site before returning home.  At LSU we will work the remainder of the semester to develop our final designs for the project.

Weekly discussions will serve to compare our two experiences with the goal of developing a series of short papers.  These papers will summarize: 1. Emerging new concepts of what is a national park; and 2. cross-cultural attitudes and approaches to national park planning comparing the American and Chinese experiences.

Synthetic Urban Ecologies

Bradley Cantrell

Site: Port of Oakland, Oakland Army Base, and Neighboring West Oakland Communities

Collaborators: Urban Biofilter, Adapt Oakland

Synthetic Urban Ecologies Studio Brief

The interface between the constructed environment and ecological systems is slowly blurring new strategies in urbanism, biological engineering, and technological interfaces. Homogeneous, detrimental impacts within the constructed environment demand a synthesis of new relationships between industry, settlement, and evolving biological systems that frame the landscape as a synthesizer of biotic and abiotic processes. The interstices of these new relationships become the medium in which the course will examine new potentials for sensing, monitoring, automation, and robotics within the design of synthetic ecologies.

Synthetic Urban Ecologies Studio will build upon the work completed in Responsive Systems Studio Fall 2011, with an emphasis on site-specific urban and industrial influenced ecological systems. The studio will develop divisive interventions for the Port of Oakland, Oakland Army Base and Neighboring West Oakland Communities, a site whose environmental conditions have presented severe health risks, environmental impacts, as well as social and environmental injustice due to the concentration of air pollution in the form of particulate matter. Using the innovative work that Urban Biofilter is pursuing through Adapt Oakland, a project that develops standards and policy recommendations for green urban infill at both city and state levels, the studio will take advantage of the unique opportunities this site presents for adaptive design within a working urban and industrial landscape. This noxious output of particulate matter can be envisioned as a signifier for a critical opportunity for intervention within this complex system, for undesirable outputs to be metabolized. Elevated outputs associated with industry and constructed environments require synthetic ecological systems to become hyper-productive and hyper-performative.

The concept that ecological systems reach and desire stasis/climax has long been refuted. The design of synthetic ecologies requires the ability for adaptation and adaptive management informed by real-time sensing and monitoring of site phenomena. Adjustments to the system allow for an approach to environmental remediation that is preemptive, opening up new territory in active industrial sites, not just post-industrial landscapes. This view of ecological systems, through the lens of responsive technologies, posits that the designer is responsible for the creation and implementation of processes that curate, manage, and sculpt landscape systems.

The studio will begin the semester with a site visit to Oakland, CA and will have access to the developing library of resources Urban Biofilter has been collecting and potential on-site remote sensing capabilities. This will facilitate a laboratory studio setting for immersion in building working site models with performative interventions. The studio will engage prototyping, virtual models, and physical models as the primary modes of exploration. Studio participants will be exposed to a range of tools for the prototyping of responsive systems and environmental simulations that will be required to develop proposals for the site. Participants will use this knowledge to develop expertise through multiple iterations and rigorous research and documentation.

Seminars

Uncovering Haiti:  Race, Representation, Regeneration and the Necessity for Openness in the Caribbean Landscape

Austin Allen

Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck recently completed a critical documentary on the disaster recovery effort in Haiti following the earthquake of 2010. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Yj2pxdqtY#action=share

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGPbqO5ocrE#action=share

How do we as landscape architects fit within a world undergoing climate change, plate shifts and a resulting number of catastrophic events?  Are contemporary disaster recovery strategies adequate or even helpful in addressing problems like the outcomes of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti?  Are planning and design strategies undergoing a paradigm shift fueled by our inability to grasp the magnitude and complexity of thesse disasters or of place?  I wrote earlier Responses to human disasters in the built environment often are addressed initially through enlisting disciplines of engineering and sciences as if the rational is the only spaces where we dwell… in the hope of a logical solution to an overwhelming set of circumstances.   But, these disciplines provide us with an imaginary world where the cultural and the unknown are heavily discounted, in order to give clarity to even more illusionary phenomena — one where we as humans control all of the major variables.  We allow for “clean slates” where they do not exist.   The human reality is one that integrates sciences with arts, the sense of the real with the sense of the imagined, the cultural and spiritual with the logical and pragmatic, the historical with the present and the future. Through envisioning the unimaginable, we seek the line between the possible and the impossible within design and planning.  The virtual and real world constantly inform and blur one into another, like filmic re-presentations of tangible landscapes re-informing virtual landscapes that anchor us in ever shifting realities.  Our dreamscapes are our mappings of places of beginnings, endings and entrapments…

Through our discipline’s inability to reconcile the fixing of race and place with recovery, has become the iconic fixation, the cultural symbols of the catastrophic events in a complex, recurring examination of race and place, that may or may not resolve into a ‘just’ arrangement.

The rebuilding of landscape must place the human dimension along side the scientific in order to create a coherent dialogue that moves beyond dreamscapes long enough to ask the most difficult of landscape design and planning questions.   Why engage the land, who will occupy this place, and how shall we make this happen in an open, just and regenerative way? 

The course is designed to participate in this disaster recovery inquiry by focusing on selected sites in Haiti and assessing what can be done through landscape architecture to enhance recovery efforts along with Haitians, in an open, just and regenerative manner.  This course is a prerequisite for an intersession studio in Haiti that is scheduled for December 2013 and a potential studio for Spring 2014.  We are examining previous efforts and new opportunities to work with Haitian institutions in and around the urban setting of Jacmel in the Southeast and the agricultural setting of Centre de Formation Fritz Lafontant’s school, Zanmi Agrikol, in the Central part of Haiti.  The course will look at previous LSU studios in Haiti and on the island of Hispaniola, including at least Wes Michael’s current work and mine in 2010.

Seminar Title TBD

Kevin Risk

Seminar Description not yet available

Ordering the Louisiana Landscape: Process, Pattern, Permanence, Change

Cathy Marshall

This seminar course provides an introduction to theory and practice in the preservation, interpretation and management of historic cultural landscapes, focusing on specific Louisiana examples that operate between the scale of discrete sites and interconnected systems.  The course will combine focused readings and critical discussion of cultural landscape studies and preservation methodology with active field documentation, drawing, and archival research into specific case study landscapes in order to build a collective research/ documentation framework for recording an emerging typology of fragile and threatened Louisiana landscape archetypes.

Writing for Design

Lake Douglas

Writing is integral to effective communication, and effective communication in all its forms (writing, speaking, graphic) is essential to success in the design community.  This class will examine different forms of written communication useful in design practice; a secondary emphasis will be on using writing skills effectively in other means of communication (graphic, visual, oral).  Writing for design professionals can be organized by categories, such as the following:

• Marketing: project proposals; correspondence with prospective clients; design award submittals; exhibition boards; multi-media presentations; press releases; brochures and portfolios; promotional copy; job applications;
• Project-related: client team and in-house project communications; research and precedent studies; feasibility studies; planning documents;
• Office communications:  in-house communications, communicating with contractors and clients; records of meetings and conversations; in-house memoranda;
• Publicity: getting work published and publicity for projects and office activities;
• Books and portfolios:  increasingly design offices are self-publishing their work in book form to demonstrate design expertise  to potential clients; often this work is out-sourced to those who know little (if anything) about design professions because of a lack of in-house skills;
• Academic work:  if you plan to go into academics, writing is an essential part of what you will do (“publish or perish”); this includes writing for academic journals (research articles; reviews, etc.), and popular press, writing conference papers and case studies;
• Grant applications:  often the work of designers can increased with supplemental financial support from funding agencies that require applications through specified formats; as a design professional, how do you effectively participate in this activity?

Being able to write about design projects from an informed design perspective is becoming increasingly important.  The intent of this class is to increase your value to an employer – and your earning potential – by learning how to communicate effectively in written formats.

The American Academy in Rome awards the Rome Prize to a select group of artists and scholars, after an application process that begins in the fall of each year. The winners, announced in the spring, are invited to Rome to pursue their work in an atmosphere conducive to intellectual and artistic freedom, interdisciplinary exchange, and innovation.

The encounter with Rome represents now, as it has done since the Academy’s inception, something unique: a chance for American artists and scholars to spend significant time interacting and working in one of the oldest, most cosmopolitan cities in the world. The richness of Rome’s artistic and cultural legacy and its power to stimulate creative thinking served as the initial impetus for the Academy’s founding. Today, those tendencies live on, transformed as ever by the dynamism of the Academy’s constantly evolving community. The community includes Fellows, Residents, Visiting Artists and Scholars, and, come June, members of academic Summer Programs.

The lecture will touch on four major topics

1. Move from pilot projects to GSI as an infrastructure system.
2. Leveraging the economic benefits of integrating GSI.
3. Thinking through the details to achieve performance based solutions.
4. Shifting from maintaining designs to designing for maintenance

Peg Staeheli, PLA, LEED® AP is a founding principal with Seattle based SvR Design Company, an integrated practice that blurs the lines between landscape architecture, civil engineering, and applied ecology.  SvR is a national leader in the planning and design of green infrastructure systems. Peg has been active in facilitating the design industry shift to an integrated disciplines approach to planning, design and maintenance. She has presented at national conferences on pedestrian mobility, accessible design, and green infrastructure systems. Peg is a registered landscape architect and LEED Accredited Professional.

22 March

“One Hundred and Ninety-Nine Miles”

Appalachian Studies Association Conference, Boone, NC

At the Appalachian Studies Association Conference, Rob Holmes presented research conducted with Brian Davis (lecturer in the Cornell University Department of Landscape Architecture) studying Huntington Tri-State Port. It is the largest inland port in the United States by tonnage, stretching one hundred and ninety-nine miles in West Virginia, Kentucky, and Ohio along the Ohio, Big Sandy, and Kanawha Rivers. The research combines historical, material, and spatial analyses to suggest that this elongated set of urban-industrial corridors represents a uniquely Appalachian mediating practice between river and mountains, resulting from technologies and their histories, existing geological, hydrological, and physiographic conditions, and the extractive pull of a national economy at continental scale. By asserting a synthetic view of this landscape, understanding it as a dynamic palimpsest of forests and rivers, mineral deposits and urban traces undergoing constant change, it becomes possible to imagine alternative possibilities for the future organization of the Tri-state landscape.