LA 4501 Historic Preservation and Commemoration in the Built Environment
This course broadly covers the history, theory, and practices of historic preservation, with a particular focus on the historical geographies of the American South. Students explore how to identify, investigate, and give voice to the historical narratives of spaces, places, and memories embedded in the built environment. To do this, we will develop diverse definitions of historical significance, survey various archives of information, and experiment with different written, visual, and material practices for spatializing memory.
The class also questions how preservation and acts of memorialization produce public memories, and the politics that surround how the past is remembered. Lastly, it covers the standard practices of professional preservation planning through the National Park Service Heritage Documentation Programs, which includes the Historic American Building Survey, Historic American Landscape Survey, and the Historic American Engineering Record.
Working in collaboration with photography students as partners, landscape architecture students must select three sites within the East Baton Rouge Parish to research and document. Students must choose a building, a landscape, and a structure. For each site students will work together to conduct in-depth research and produce visual evidence. Partners work closely with each other sharing their knowledge, skills, and understanding so that each party feels confident in working in new ways. This means landscape architecture students should make photographs as well, and photography students should also be conducting research.
Class is in conjunction with Art 4941 Special Topics in Photography.
LA 4008 Advanced Topics Studio: Synthetic Urban Ecologies
The fall 2013 “Synthetic Urban Ecologies” advanced topics studio emphasized site-specific urban and industrial influenced ecological systems. Students were charged to develop divisive interventions for the Port of Oakland, Oakland Army Base, and neighboring West Oakland communities, a site where environmental conditions have presented severe health risks and 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 took advantage of the unique opportunities the site presents for adaptive design within a working urban and industrial landscape.
Advanced topics studios in landscape architecture address research and projects in the profession and make up part of the landscape architecture program’s travel requirements. The studios are a vertical mix of fifth-year undergraduate students and third-year graduate students.
LA 4008 Advanced Topics Studio: Biloxi Beachfront Reimagined
The site for the fall 2013 “Biloxi Beachfront Reimagined” advanced topics studio was the main beachfront in Biloxi, Mississippi, which has been highly modified by coastal engineering, development on the dune system, and the impacts of Hurricane Katrina. Students were asked to build on earlier strategic planning to develop proposals for the beachfront that would connect it to other open spaces, neighborhoods, and downtown and enhance the beach experience and the beachfront amenities while supporting economic development and sustainable infrastructure. The studio focused on the design of parks as resilient hybrid ecological systems and encouraged students to engage with the technology of water, vegetation, and site engineering within an existing social and cultural context. Students explored the existing and future site systems, vegetation, infrastructure for storm protection and drainage, sand management, fauna, and water and energy as a way of improving the landscape’s performance. They were asked to develop an improved facility, considering the pragmatics of open space design, such as circulation and parking, access and connectivity, programming, maintenance, and management.
Advanced topics studios in landscape architecture address research and projects in the profession and make up part of the landscape architecture program’s travel requirements. The studios are a vertical mix of fifth-year undergraduate students and third-year graduate students.
LA 4008 Advanced Topics Studio: Exploration in New Territories
Students enrolled in the fall 2013 “Culture and Design: Exploration in New Territories” advanced topics studio had a choice of two projects and locations. Each group had the opportunity to travel to their project site at the beginning of the semester. The first group traveled to Anchorage, Alaska, to conduct fieldwork at Denali National Park, where they worked with NPS professional staff. The students were charged with developing a facility, visitor’s center, and training area and backpacking, hiking, and camping site at Toklat Camp, a maintenance camp for park roads with heavy equipment, gravel mining, and lodging for seasonal workers. The second group traveled to Chengdu, China, to work in a collaborative studio with landscape architecture students at Sichuan Agricultural University on a cultural and agricultural tourism project in the mountains adjacent to the city of Ya’an. The students explored strategies for preserving an agrarian way of life—a living cultural preserve—that could be a model for preserving other cultural resources that are under threat as China embarks on the urbanization of the country.
Advanced topics studios in landscape architecture address research and projects in the profession make up part of the landscape architecture program’s travel requirements. The studios are a vertical mix of fifth-year undergraduate students and third-year graduate students.
LA 4101 Advanced Digital Representation
In the advanced digital representation course, students learn advanced techniques in digital representation, such as three-dimensional modeling, terrain modeling, animation, and advanced imaging and rendering.
LA 5002 Landscape Design VIII: Capstone Project (Spring 2016)
The fifth-year landscape design studio is centered on the intensive development of a comprehensive landscape design and/or an independent design project. This studio is referred to as the “Capstone Project,” as it requires students to utilize and combine all of the skills and knowledge they have acquired throughout the five-year undergraduate landscape architecture program. Two capstone projects from spring 2016 received Student Honor Awards from the American Society of Landscape Architecture: William Baumgardner for “Harnessing the Beating Heart: Living Systems Infrastructure on Tonle Sap Lake, Cambodia,” and Alexander Morvant for “The Vermilion Corridor: Rediscovering the Waterways of Southern Louisiana.”
LA 5002 Landscape Design VIII: Capstone Project (Spring 2013)
The fifth-year landscape design studio is centered on the intensive development of a comprehensive landscape design and/or an independent design project. This studio is referred to as the “Capstone Project,” as it requires students to utilize and combine all of the skills and knowledge they have acquired throughout the five-year undergraduate landscape architecture program.
