This research seminar trains students to decipher and develop an understanding of landscape as a nested framework of design agencies and potentials, generative across layers and scales — from material agency to territorial structure, from ecosystemic constituents to habitat formations. A global selection of notable bodies of modernist and contemporary landscape architecture and landscape-driven urban design shall serve as the frame for this investigation. Parallel to the analysis of these germinal projects, students shall do close readings of key texts in contemporary landscape theory and landscape urbanist thought, as well as precedent discourse. The objectives are: to deconstruct the ‘gazes,’ or operative concepts, that design practitioners construct in regard to landscape and the urban process, and to critically assess the strategies and methods they use to enhance or restore landscape’s context-specific capacity as agent, medium, and field of relations.

Students will gain insight in the epistemologies, concepts, techniques, and procedural frameworks that support contemporary landscape architecture and landscape-driven urban design. Furthermore, they will develop an expanded conceptual background on which to critique existing regulatory frameworks of land use, urban, and regional planning. Finally, students will be asked to speculate further on which methodological innovations and pedagogical formats can aid their own search for more precise problem definitions and design strategies towards desired socio-environmental and political futures.