Designing Landscape Architectural Education Studio Ecologies for Unpredictable Futures

No single project or endeavour is immune to the issues that the climate crisis brings. The climate crisis encompasses a broad register of "symptoms" – increased global temperatures and sea-level rise, droughts and extreme bushfire events, salinification and desertification of fertile land, and the list goes on. It reveals and amplifies complex causal relationships that are inherently present and traverse scales, sectors and communities divulging a range of impacts and inequalities. This publication asks designers and academic practitioners to describe their own work through an ecological lens, and then to articulate design approaches for developing new practices in landscape architecture teaching. Designing Landscape Architectural Education: Studio Ecologies for Unpredictable Futures, the Landscape Architecture Design Studio Companion, serves as a resource for academic practitioners in the preparation and delivery of "design-research studios" and students seeking guidance for design methodologies as a part of their landscape architectural education. It draws on the manifold issues of the climate crisis as a set of drivers to examine the utilisation of a range of innovative design approaches to address the current and future priorities of the discipline. The landscape architecture discipline is evolving rapidly to respond to both a broadening and intensification of changes in the environmental, social and political conditions. These changing conditions require innovation that extend the core competencies of landscape architects. This book addresses two fundamental questions– what are the design competencies required of landscape architects to equip them to deal with the complexities brought forth by contemporary society, and as a result, how could we design the future design studio?

ForewordCharles WaldheimPrefaceRosalea Monacella and Bridget KeaneStudio EcologiesRosalea Monacella and Bridget KeanePart 1: Material Ecologies1. The Anthropocene Chamber: A Pedagogic Experiment in Climate Change CommunicationRania Ghosn2. Think Like a River: Designing from the Riparian ZoneJane Mah Hutton3. Edible EcologiesZaneta Hong4. Conversation with FormafantasmaRosalea Monacella, Bridget Keane and Simone Farresin5. Shifting Grounds / Curating Creative Instabilities in Design Studio PedagogyChris Reed6. Climate Core: A Roadmap for Climate Education in the Built EnvironmentJesse M. KeenanPart 2: Generative Lineages7. Hope in Restless PedagogyRosetta Elkin8. A Conversation about LanguageTeresa Gali Izard, Luke Harris, Cara Turett, and Bonnie Kate Walker9. Conversation with Nina-Marie ListerRosalea Monacella, Bridget Keane and Nina-Marie Lister10. Experimental studio ecologies: A productive throwntogethernessEd Wall & Alexis Liu11. Adapting practice for the future of landscape-driven urban designAnya Domlesky12. Frames and fictions: Designing a Green New Deal studio sequenceBilly Fleming13. Conversation with Kate OrffRosalea Monacella, Bridget Keane and Kate OrffPart 3: Processes of Fieldwork14. Tales from the Dark Side of the City.Unknown Fields (Kate Davies & Liam Young)15. Climate Inquiries from Arctic FieldworkLeena Cho16. Conversation with Peter Del TrediciRosalea Monacella, Bridget Keane and Peter Del Tredici17. Framing futures: Worldbuilding in landscape studios. Marc Miller18. Finding Landscape through Curiosity. Sean Burkholder19. In situ/ex situ: Geometries of density and spectraJames MelsomPart 4: Sensing Landscapes20. Computing with nature: Digital design methodologies across scales. Pia Fricker21. Envisioning the planetary: Design agency in the climate crisisClara Oloriz Sanjuan & Jose Alfredo Ramírez 22. A Sensed Landscape. Craig Douglas 23. Conversation with Bradley Cantrell.Rosalea Monacella, Bridget Keane and Bradley Cantrell24. Architecture of Ecological Attunement: Environment Form and FeedbackDana Cupkova25. From Grain to the TerritoryAna Abram & Maj Plamenitas26. Longitudinal LandscapesJustine HolzmanPart 5: Expanded Ecologies27. Asymmetries and urbanization Elisa Cristiana Cattaneo28. The Territory as a subjectPaola Viganò29. Relational Urbanism: Expanded ecologies for a capital earth system. Enriqueta Llabres-Valls, Sheng-Yang Huang & Zach Fluker30. Conversation with Jennifer Deger.Rosalea Monacella, Bridget Keane and Jennifer Deger31. Attune and entangle: Designing multispecies relations for the sixth extinctionMichael Ezban32. Ecology and two thesis lab cases. Roberto Pasini 33. From "Gutter to Gulf" to the ’Glades: A Decade of Urban Landscape Climate Resilience Studios at the University of Toronto 2008–2018Fadi Masoud, Elise Shelley and Jane WolffConclusion: Tending Towards a Matter of (Ethics of Ground)Rosalea Monacella and Bridget Keane

Rosalea Monacella is a faculty member of the Landscape Architecture Program at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Her expertise is in the careful indexing and shifting of dynamic resource flows that inform the landscape of the city. Her design research practice explores the notion of the "thickened ground" through a careful and rigorous investigation of an expanded ecology of economic, ecological and social systems that shape the metabolic and material flows of the city. Speculating on alternative near-future cities and how they might respond to climate change, changing resource flows and ecologies of energy. Bridget Keane is a lecturer in the Landscape Architecture programme at RMIT University. As a landscape architect/academic, her research and practice are concerned with landscape as a dynamic material system and considers ways in which global systems impact local landscapes through speculating on alternate futures of how we might live in response to issues of climate change, ecologies of waste and the effects of extractive industries.