Aspiring landscape architects attended the first annual Landscape Architecture Explorations Summer Camp at LSU’s Hilltop Arboretum, July 13–17, 2015.

The weeklong camp developed by faculty of the LSU Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture (RRSLA) offers high school students, age 14–18, opportunities to explore the profession. The camp included individually tutored design workshops, information sessions, lectures by advanced professionals and faculty, drawing workshops, and field trips to the LSU main campus, professional design offices, and award-winning project sites in the greater Baton Rouge area.

Associate Professor Cathy Marshall developed the camp’s course content and student activities and trained and prepared the current landscape architecture students who helped teach the participating high school students. She and Peggy Davis, executive director of LSU Hilltop Arboretum, also coordinated the field trips, which included a tour of downtown Baton Rouge with Justin Lemoine, owner of ELS Landscape Architecture Studio, and visits to the professional offices of Suzanne Turner & Associates and Reich Associates. Professor Emeritus and former interim director of RRSLA Van Cox, alumna and former faculty member Justine Holzman, Associate Professor Kevin Risk, and Reich Teaching Professor and Director Mark Boyer presented lectures in landscape architecture and critiqued student work. Current RRSLA students led workshops, taught drawing skills, and introduced the participants to site-sketching techniques and model building. Student volunteers included:

• Ry’yan Clark, BLA;
• Xueyang Huang, MLA;
• Ethan Nocosia, BLA;
• Taylor Richardson, BLA;
• Maria Talledo, MLA; and
• Yuting Zhou, MLA.

The RRSLA student volunteers also put together this video recap, which highlights the many activities, lecturers, and field trips that took place during this year’s camp.

LSU’s Landscape Architecture Explorations Summer Camp will take place again at Hilltop Arboretum in summer 2016. View more information about this year’s camp at landscape.lsu.edu.