LAND_401 Landscape Architecture Design I: ‘Play Again, Again: Landscape Memory Path’

Play Again, Again: Landscape Memory Path

 

This studio approached landscapes of memory and “spatial justice” issues. Landscape architects are outside learners, so this studio learned outside. The differences and similarities between the meanings of simple concepts were discussed, like “representation,” “to represent” and “to render”; make, construct, recognize, correspond, map, measure, play, and practice. The difference between being precise and exact, “spatially” speaking. In this studio, students do what they say.

 

 

Chance, procedural, and iterative operations guided drawing, performance, and modeling experiments. Story-making balanced storytelling, which balanced story-listening to create a reciprocal learning structure. “Viewing-in-motion” and “viewing-in-stillness,” as landscape historian Stanislaus Fung writes, was paired with “listening-in-motion,” “listening-in-stillness,” and other perceptual training

 

 

Themes of urban life, love, and pain were untold, retold, and newly addressed through the landscape. Students expressed their own perspectives, values, positions, memories, and meanings about life, climate, and constant change in 2D and 3D drawings, photographs, performances, scripted lines, sound media, videos, and poems.

 

 

At the recommendation of Adrienne Davis of Washington University, the studio performed “A Raisin in the Sun” by Lorraine Hansberry while traveling along Grand Boulevard, which served as a classroom and landscape laboratory. Everyone has a role to play; the landscape approach is to learn all these roles by heart.

 

 

Landscapes are humanity’s archives. As students traveled along Grand, they collected small urban dermis, detritus, and flotsam to identify patterns across simultaneous visual and auditory scales, explore style, fashion, and words as policy, labels as public agreement, social and cultural nuggets, humanity’s unintentional Land Legacy of waste. These  collections invited analytical online glee. Strangers asked what are you doing and why are you doing it, then who are you. Police-servants asked, kids asked, homeless people asked, panhandlers asked, anybody walking by asked, if they felt like it, and students learned how to begin constructing answers for anybody that asks what, how, when, who, and why.

 

 

Every rendering students made between September and December 2019 was an act of them “reaching out” to you.

 

 

Thanks to community partners: Carlie Lee and Timothy Cobb (Missouri School for the Blind), Kristin Fleischmann Brewer (Pulitzer Arts Foundation), Chris Carl (Studio Land Arts), and Ambassadors of the Why: David Cunningham, Geoff Ward, Edward Keller and his class (The New School/Parsons), Julia Debski (Tanya Bonakdar Gallery), Theodore Hoerr (Terrain Work), Thaddeus Pawlowski (Columbia University), Jesse Seldess, Jonathan Solomon (SAIC), A. J. Pires (ALLOY Development), Chris Junkin (Rogers Partners), and Isabel Castilla (Field Operations).