2022 MLA Capstone
GENERATIVE INFRASTRUCTURES
CATALYTIC LANDSCAPES
EMERGENT NARRATIVES
SPECULATIONS FOR SEATTLE’S SOUTH PARK COMMUNITY
Show Your South Park by Erin Irby, Stephanie Roh, Erynne Van Zee Challenge
Climate change, social injustice, dwindling public funds, industrial contamination, and population growth
and migration task the built environment, and particularly public landscapes with addressing an
expanding range of physical, cultural, and infrastructural demands. This mandates
a fundamental shift from public landscapes as a collection of discrete properties with limited ability for
resilience and agency to the reconfiguration of public landscapes as nimble, flexible, and sustaining
urban systems. To realize this, public lands must be reconceived as generative infrastructures acting
across catalytic landscapes revealing emergent, alternative narratives.REFUSE | INFUSE by Cyrus Deloye and Justin Roberts
Intent
The capstone studio’s work will concentrate on speculative thinking and design research within an urban
context. As a capstone studio, based on their research and interests, students will determine their specific focus of exploration, the principal scale of their investigation, and site for their design interventions as they consider the potential of public landscape
systems to respond to conditions of climate change, environmental justice, community wealth building
and displacement. Students will consider potential futures through the development of possible future
scenarios. The scenarios will be used to both “ground truth” ideas of policy and implementation and
conversely to inspire what policies and implementation models are needed to create the scenario. The
scenarios will serve as a flexible mechanism for exploration across time (near and distant futures), space
(site, neighborhood, city, region) and agency (community member, designers, city, state).REDEFINING BOUNDARIES by Yingzhi (Sherry) Xu Sites
The studio will explore urban public landscapes across scales – the region, the city, the neighborhood and
the site. We will focus on the South Park neighborhood in Seattle. Objectively, South Park’s defining
characteristics are similar to other under resourced urban neighborhoods: its population is diverse and
predominantly indigenous and people of color; almost a third of its population lives below the poverty
line; it is facing increasing pressures of displacement and gentrification; it suffers from noise, air, and
water pollution – the legacy of the adjacent Duwamish Waterway (aka a 5.5 mile long Superfund site),
active industrial businesses and a state highway that bisects the community; and the typical life
expectancy is lower than any other neighborhood of Seattle. South Park’s literal ground is tenuous, being
part of the former Duwamish River’s tidal flats, and is at risk of flooding from increasingly more frequent
and intense storm surges and sea level rise.EXTENTION OF CONNECTION by Jiahua Zou Outcomes
A goal of the studio is exploring the role designers (and the College) in collaboration with communities should play
envisioning and planning for Seattle’s near and distant futures. Listening to, learning from, and engaging
with current conversations about our city with its officials is fundamental to leveraging landscape architecture in
configuring the city we want to inhabit.
2024 MLA CAPSTONE STUDIO
2024 MLA Capstone recap displaying the work of students in the 2024 Capstone Studio.
Emotional Infrastructure: Through time, place and disruption, fostering a culture of care in post-earthquake Christchurch, New Zealand
Laura Durgerian, 2019. Advisors: Lynne Manzo and Rachel Berney
First, Let us Look Together. through forests, trees, wood, and building
Bennet Walker Song, 2020. Advisors: Daniel Winterbottom, Kimo Griggs
Planning For Pest Readiness: Building Climate Resilience in Seattle’s Urban Forest with a Community-centric Approach
Luyu Zeng, 2021. Advisors: Jeff Hou, Lynne Manzo
Vertical Landscapes: Learning From a Rock Climbing Perspective
Ellie Murray, 2021. Advisors: Julie Johnson, Branden Born
Living Laboratory: A Circular Framework for North Seattle College
Emilio Craddock, 2021. Advisors: Gundula Proksch, Julie Johnson
Unsettling Prairies: A Critical Reimagining of Fire Management in Cities
Jocine Velasco, 2021. Advisors: Ken Yocom, Cleo Woelfle-Erskine, Clarita Lefthand-Begay
Design with Diploria: Coral Infrastructure for a New Coastal Future
Matt Grosser, 2020. Advisors: Ken Yocom and Jacqueline Padilla-Gamiño
Nourishing Neighborhoods: Cultivating Local Food Connections in the Urban Environment
Asya Snejnevski, 2020. Advisors: Ken Yocom and Julie Johnson
Pier Pressure: Addressing Ecological Opportunities of Nearshore Infrastructure in Lake Washington's Union Bay
Krista Doersch, 2020. Advisors: Nancy Rottle and Ken Yocom
Voices of Impact: Assessing the Felt Impacts of Open-Pit Gold and Copper Mining in British Columbia
Ilsa Barrett, 2020. Ken Yocom and Catherine De Almeida
Exploring the Potentials of Interdisciplinary Studios in the University of Washington College of Built Environments
Yuansi Cai, 2020. Advisors: Branden Born, Julie M. Johnson, and Rachel E. Berney
Marking Risk and Response: Design Interventions to Support Citizen Science Monitoring of the Trans Mountain Pipelines
Peter Samuels, 2020. Advisors: Catherine De Almeida and Jeff Hou
A Bouquet of Benefits: Floriculture and Ecosystem Gifts in an Urban Industrial Zone
Elizabeth Housley, 2020. Advisors: Catherine De Almeida and Ken Yocom
Navigating Extractive Entanglements through the Synthesis of Infrastructure and Ecological Function in Iquitos, Peru
Hope Freije and Rhiannon Neuville, 2020. Advisors: Julie Parrett, Leann Andrews, and Coco Alarcón
Reimagining the amphibious city: From health data to ecological design in an Amazonian informal community
Rebecca Bachman, 2020. Advisors: Leann Andrews and Nancy Rottle