Courses

Keith Harris
3 credits, A&H/SSc
MWF 1:00 – 2:20 PM
SLN: 17159
Questions? contact Jennie Li, jencyli@uw.edu

How do landscape architects and other designers shape our cities, our lives, and our futures? Through fieldwork, hand-on activities, research, and discussion, this course explores innovative and interdisciplinary design thinking and practice that addresses critical human issues from the local to the global scale.

Eric Higbee
3 credits, A&H
TTh 11:30–12:50
SLN : 17163

“Site design and planning is the art and science shaping the places we live and work. Its aim is foundationally moral and aesthetic: to enhance everyday life.” 

– Lynch and Hack, Site Planning

Through field trips, lectures, drawing, and discussion, this course explores the art and science of shaping sites. Balancing broad conceptual frameworks with practical tools, we will survey the ecological, cultural, political and technical dimensions that influence site design and planning in contemporary practice.

Elizabeth Umbanhowar
5 credits A&H/SSc+Writing
TTh 1:30–3:20
SLN: 17164

Landscape architecture is more than the study of private gardens. Landscape histories bear witness to the diverse experiences, ideas, and people that, through time, have shaped space and place both exalted and everyday. Learning to “read” landscape and its histories offers important skills to challenge the legacies of colonialism and oppression, interrogate our present-day environmental crises, and navigate uncertain futures. In this survey course we critically examine the writing, production, and performance of global landscapes and their narratives from the Paleolithic to the mid-19th century.

Amy Wagenfeld, PhD, OTR/L, SCEM, EDAC, FAOTA,  Affiliate Faculty (Landscape Architecture)
3 credits
Tu 6-8:50 pm
SLN: 17181

This seminar is designed to provide students with an overview of the eight sensory systems and their role in design. Providing future design professionals with a footing in the importance of the sensory systems and their relevance to built environments enriches design decisions by giving students a better understanding of how the sensory systems guide our daily lives, resulting in more thoughtful, adaptive, and inclusive designs. With increased interest in designing for individuals with neurodiversity this seminar is timely and important.

Weekly small group assignments culminating in a final major project as well as information sharing, guest lectures, and experiential learning will factor significantly into the course structure.

Spring 2023_MLA Selective Options
Spring 2023 BLA Directed Electives

L Arch 322: Intro to Planting Design

Kristi Park
3 cr. A&H
MW 11:30-12:50 (M: async lecture, W: in person field trips/discussion)
SLN: 16050

As human populations face climate change, can urban inhabitants embrace design ideas that reconceptualizes cities as resilient ecosystems and reconnect humans with nature? In this course, we will explore this question through topics related to contemporary urban planning, design, construction, and maintenance of built environments. L Arch 322 encourages students to explore a wide variety of topics through engaging with online-presentations, podcasts, readings, self-guided urban field trips and participation in group discussions. Assignments for this course will involve a variety of means including art-making, graphic novel development, design-thinking and observational skills.

 

L Arch 363: Ecological Design and Planning

Jenn Engelke
3 cr. NSc, BLA theory requirement
undergraduates only, graduates sign up for L Arch 563
SLN: 16051

Introduction to landscape ecological theory applied to urban environments and design. This course will compare different vocabularies and theories used to describe landscape structure and function. Discussion will also include design theories that have sought to re-center landscape, planning and design around the goal of achieving ecological sustainability. Coursework will include the following:

• Guest lectures from practitioners and field experts
• Field trips to explore site analysis
• Discussions and critical engagement with peers

L Arch 423: Plant ID & Management

Botany for Built Environments 
Katie Vincent
TTh 2:30-5:20
3 cr. BLA plant ID requirement
SLN: 16053

Plants are the living communities that sustain life. A familiarity with plants and their culture is foundational to building resilient landscapes. Students will learn to identify and relate to PNW native and introduced plants through multiple ways of “knowing,” including pattern recognition and dichotomous keys. The course will explore ethnobotanical relationships with plants, as well as biocultural, ecological and maintenance considerations. This course also offers students the opportunity to widen their view of landscape architecture to include ecological design, horticulture, taxonomy, and the many contributions of plants to urban ecology.

L Arch 454: History of Urban Landscapes

The Nature of Cities
Elizabeth Umbanhowar
MWF 11:30-12:50
5 cr. SSc, optional W, BLA history requirement
SLN: 16056

In the tumult of COVID-19, escalating social divisions, and the Anthropocene, the history of urban landscapes offers a critical vantage from which to glimpse where we have been so that we can envision and have agency in where we are going. In this course, we will interrogate the role of climate change and injustice within the design histories of cities. By comparing historic and contemporary urban narratives, we will engage in meaningful conversations about how histories are produced and disseminated, and why interpretation of the past matters more than ever today. Through the History of Urban Landscapes: The Nature of Cities we will examine the entangled narratives of colonialization, race, capitalism, industrialization, and land. And interrogate the role of identity, memory, technology and design in shaping urban form and novel ecologies. Participants will hone critical skills in research, reading, writing, analysis, and empathy. We will also experiment with multimedia methods and cultivate proficiencies in imagination, interpretation, and representation. In so doing, we prepare ourselves to act as effective, thoughtful, creative, and agile design agents and advocates in the face of challenging and unpredictable futures.

L Arch 498B: Repairing Waste Relations

Catherine DeAlmeida
WF, 9:00-10:20
3 cr.
SLN: 16058

Challenge
Current waste management practices create landfills and polluted sites in which materials and resources are forever removed from potential systems of recovery. Such waste landscapes create vulnerability within and surrounding their sites, which are typically relegated to the peripheries of urban environments along with marginalized communities, contributing to waste injustice. How might built environments become more equitable if systems of recovery received more investment than systems of extraction? Although Circular Economy (CE) calls for waste reduction and reuse, direct applications to specific neighborhoods with unique needs are vague, especially communities impacted by waste injustice. What is the role of CE in the design and planning of built environments, particularly when considering waste landscapes, and the communities affected by them?
Waste shapes relational webs between humans, more-than-humans, and their places; it connects everything to landscape. Given these waste relations, landscape offers unique opportunities for reimagining CE frameworks as community-centered. We will explore these potentials as we unravel the blurry, ambiguous, culturally constructed attitudes toward waste, its spatial and materials implications, and uncover its possibilities to address environmental and climate justice.

Process
The course will use guest lecturers, readings, class discussions, field trip(s), and a quarter- long case study research project to explore the spatial and material performance (or lack thereof) of waste. Case studies will include a range of zero waste initiatives, strategies, and technologies, and students will evaluate their policies, audiences, strategies, frameworks, costs, and possibilities for adaptation to other contexts. The course meets twice a week, with critical discussions taking place on Wednesdays, and workshops, guest lectures, working sessions, presentations, and field trips taking place on Fridays. Students will also write in-class reflections related to evolving perspectives on course content periodically throughout the quarter.

L Arch 563: Ecological Design +Planning

Celina Balderas Guzman
TTh, 10:00-11:20
3 cr. , Fulfills MLA selective
graduates only, undergraduates sign up for L Arch 363
SLN: 16058
email celinabg@uw.edu with questions

The Ecological Design + Planning seminar focuses on the translation and integration of ecological knowledge into contemporary design theory and practice. Through readings, discussions, and presentations, this class will explore explicit relationships between functional processes and the form of built environments to build deeper understanding of contemporary topics such as urban climate adaptation, green infrastructure, and designing for resilience.

Winter 2023_MLA Selective Options
Winter 2023 BLA Directed Electives

Winter 2023 Courses for Non Majors + Special Topics

L ARCH 353 | L ARCH 553: Histories of Modern Landscape Architecture

LAND | SCAPES in FLUX public spaces, personal histories in the anthropocene

MWF 11:30-12:50
Elizabeth Umbanhowar, umbanhow@uw.edu
5 credits, A&H / SSc + Writing
(SLN: 16438, Honors SLN: 16439)
Contact Jennie Li, jencyli@uw.edu for add codes.

This course explores landscape sites, systems, and symbols from the early nineteenth century until the present moment, stressing the intersections and entanglements of history with current politics, experiences and ecologies. Together we will interrogate historic narratives and examine both familiar and new landscapes, while re-centering global geographies and marginalized voices that help us make relevant the past in our Anthropocene “now.” Through creative exercises, diverse media and collaborative processes, we will critically examine the writing, production, and performance of landscape and its histories thematically through the diverse lenses of: power and ownership; memory and representation; knowledge and experience; labor and production; materiality and technological innovation; climate disruption and social change; identity and emotion; and race, class and gender.

L ARCH 361: Human Experience of Place: (Re) Thinking Urbanism
(Undergraduate)

TTh 10:00-11:20
Bo Peng
3 credits, A&H / SSc + Diversity (SLN: 16440) 

All Majors Welcome!

This year’s course will examine the human experience of place in the context of urbanism(s). Urbanism(s) as the study of cities, a field of practices, and a way of living could shed some light to address not only the physical forms but also the social and political forces that shape the built environment and the complexity of cities. As a survey course, it investigates different paradigms and visions of urban space with contested meanings, the social and political processes of placemaking, and the everyday experiences and imaginaries. Through the idea of urbanism(s), this course explores the urban environment as a continuum of ideas, movements, processes, and change. Cases and design practices around the world are introduced to understand the various social and spatial forces that come into play in the contemporary urban environment.

L ARCH 498B: Mapping the Duwamish Valley

T 10:00 AM -12:50 PM
Julie Parrett parretj@uw.edu
3 credits, (SLN: 16447)

…its agency lies in neither reproduction nor imposition but rather in uncovering realities previously unseen or unimagined, even across seemingly exhausted grounds. Thus, mapping unfolds potential; it re-makes territory over and over again, each time with new and diverse consequence.

James Corner
The Agency of Mapping: Speculation, Critique and Intervention

By their nature, urban environments are an accumulation of layers and meanings derived by an array of forces both historic and contemporary, visible and unseen. Over time, urban sites become an embedded amalgam of social, cultural, political, economic and ecological systems, actions and reactions. Some traces of their specific histories and narratives are easily read in their spatial arrangement, naming, and cultural context; while others have been suppressed or erased and remain unseen unremembered, and unknown. The stories we choose to prioritize within public landscapes directly impact the identity and enduring narrative of the place and the people associated with it. In this course, we will employ critical cartography for a “thick reading” of the Duwamish Valley as an operational design strategy for revealing and engaging.

 

L ARCH 498C: Perceptions of Nature in the Dense City

W 6:00-8:50 PM
Laure Heland heland@uw.edu
3 credits, (SLN: 16448)
Fulfills Socio-Political Dimensions of Design selective for MLA students

There is a current trend to design green environments and infrastructure in dense cities, which claim to be “Natural” or “representing Nature.” What is the “Nature” that designers and planners are referring to – and for what purpose? Is Nature a pristine condition in an untouched environment or can it be a hybridization of human and natural systems? How do such definitions and perceptions impact both professional approaches, and the public acceptance of new design idioms?

Through lectures, readings and experimentations, this class will explore various perceptions and definitions of Nature associated with contemporary design projects of green infrastructures in the context of climate change. Independent research and case study will allow students to choose and investigate one particular aspect of these topics.

L ARCH 498D: Human Development for Designers

T 6:00-8:50 PM
Dr. Amy Wagenfeld
3 credits, (SLN: 16449)
Questions? contact Jennie Li, jencyli@uw.edu

This seminar is designed to provide students with an overview of human development from birth to end of life. Providing future design professionals with a footing in human development and its relevance to built environments, from birth to end of life enriches design decisions by giving students a better understanding of how people grow and change throughout our lives, resulting in more thoughtful, adaptive, and inclusive designs. 

A final major assignment will be completed on an individual basis and weekly in class group work and information sharing will factor significantly into the course structure.

L ARCH 561: Human Experience of Place (Graduate)

MW 10:00-11:20 AM
Lynne Manzo, PhD
Environmental Psychologist
3 credits, (SLN: 16454)
lmanzo@uw.edu – email for add code

Fulfills MLA Socio-Political Dimension of Design Selective
Open to all majors, but priority to MLA students

To understand the human experiences of place, and what makes places thrive or fail, we must consider our surroundings carefully. Although we do not always recognize it, we are deeply affected by our environment – both built and natural. The environment affects our perception, thoughts, feelings, and behavior. In this class, we will explore people-place relationships through the lens of the social sciences (psychology, geography, anthropology and sociology) and design (landscape architecture, architecture and urban planning). We will consider place attachments, relationships to nature, green gentrification, the role + value of public space, and design activism.Through readings, discussions, field work + written assignments, this course will help you to think more critical about the physical world around you.

 This course will help you to:

•Develop a critical awareness of your physical surroundings and their impact on human experience•Acquire an understanding of theory + research on people-place relationships•Cultivate your critical thinking skills regarding the social dimensions of design and planning •Build skills in applying theory + research to the analysis of place through analysis papers•Improve field research and observation skills•Gain insights into what contributes to effective + appropriate design to address human needs

Autumn 2022 MLA Selective Options
Autumn 2022 BLA Directed Elective Options

Autumn 2022 Courses for Non Majors + Special Topics

L ARCH 212 | Designing the Future

Instructor TBD
3 credits, VLPA/I&S
MWF 1:00 – 2:50 PM
SLN: 17203
Questions? contact Jennie Li, jencyli@uw.edu

How do landscape architects and other designers shape our ciis, out lives, and our futures? Through fieldwork, hand-on activities, research, and discussion, this course explores innovative and interdisciplinary design thinking and practice that addresses critical human issues from the local to the global scale.

L ARCH 300 | Intro to Landscape Architecture Design Studio

Instructor TBD
3 credits, VLPA
MWF 1:30-5:30 PM
SLN:17205
Questions? contact Jennie Li, jencyli@uw.edu

This studio provides an introduction into the methods and practice of integrating landscape architectural design into urban environments. This is a heavily collaborative class in which students work closely with instructors and one another to discuss, observe, and design local environments.

L ARCH 341 | Site Design and Planning

Eric Higbee
3 credits, VLPA
TTh 10-11:20 AM
SLN:17207
Questions? contact Jennie Li, jencyli@uw.edu

“Site design and planning is the art and science shaping the places we live and work. Its aim is foundationally moral and aesthetic: to enhance everyday life.” – Lynch and Hack, Site Planning

Through field trips, lectures, and discussion, this course will explore the varied ecological, cultural, political, and technical dimensions of shaping sites for people and the planet.

L ARCH 352 | Histories of Landscape Architecture
Landscape History Lab: Experiments in (re)reading and (re)righting stories of landscape

Elizabeth Umbanhowar
5 credits, VLPA/I&S, Writing Credit
TTh 1:30-3:20 PM
SLN:17208
Questions? contact Jennie Li, jencyli@uw.edu

Fulfills BLA/MLA History requirement

Landscape architecture is more than the study of private gardens. Landscape histories bear witness to the diverse experiences, ideas, and people that, through time, have shaped space and place both exalted and everyday. Learning to “read” landscape and its histories offers important skills to challenge the legacies of colonialism and oppression, interrogate our present-day environmental crises, and navigate uncertain futures. In this survey course we critically examine the writing, production, and performance of global landscapes and their narratives from the Paleolithic to the mid-19th century.

L ARCH 498A | Therapeutic Design for Human Health

Dr. Amy Wagenfeld
3 credits
W 6-8:50
SLN:17226
Questions? contact Jennie Li, jencyli@uw.edu

Fulfills MLA Socio-Political Dimensions of Design
All Majors Welcome!

What if design was approached with a commitment to human health and wellness focused on the user and wellbeing?

Designers, planners, healthcare, and public and population health practitioners each have their own unique perspectives and each typically practice siloed from the others. Reported rates of collaboration between these groups is low, while potential to design for health and wellness is high, particularly as we navigate through the pressing issues of social and health inequities. By expanding awareness and creating opportunities to collaborate, this paradigm can change. As with most interprofessional collaboration, the respective professions profit; however, in the case of therapeutic design there is synergy and an even greater beneficiary: the end-user. This interdisciplinary seminar is timely and will provide students opportunities to learn about and engage in a conceptual collaborative therapeutic design project.

L ARCH 498D | Interdisciplinary frameworks for health, ecology, and the built environment

Coco Alarcón, Rebecca Bachman
3 credits
TTh 6-7:20
SLN: 23380
Contact: Coco Alarcón – cocoa84@uw.edu; Rebecca Bachman – rbachman@uw.edu

Fulfills BLA Ecology/UDP Elective
All Majors Welcome!

What is the built environment? What is ecology? What is public health? What frameworks stem from these fields, and how have they been integrated to take a critical, holistic approaches to complex problems facing our world? This seminar explores frameworks stemming from disciplines of the built environment, ecology, and public health/global health and the ways that they have been integrated throughout history. Students are familiarized with practical applications of interdisciplinary frameworks through exposure to current projects of researchers and professionals.

Course learning objectives include:
• To understand contemporary definitions of health, ecology, and the built environment
• To identify holistic frameworks and components
• To understand implementation and application of holistic frameworks in academia, research and professional practice

Summer 2022 Courses for Non Majors + Special Topics

L ARCH 300 | Intro to Landscape Architecture Design Studio 

Richard Desanto, Biruk Belay
6 credits, VLPA
MWF 1:30 – 5:30 PM
SLN: 11947
Questions? contact Jennie Li, jencyli@uw.edu

How do landscape architects and other designers shape our ciis, out lives, and our futures? Through fieldwork, hand-on activities, research, and discussion, this course explores innovative and interdisciplinary design thinking and practice that addresses critical human issues from the local to the global scale.

L ARCH 407 | Advanced Studio
Radical Botany: Speculative landscape futures at the intersectionality of plants, people, and place

Elizabeth Umbanhowar
6 credits, VLPA/I&S
MWF 1:10 – 5:10 PM, Full Term (A and B)
SLN: 11949
Questions? contact Elizabeth, umbanhow@uw.edu

Open to Advanced Undergraduate and Graduate Students

Will trees save us from the ravages of climate change? What lessons can moss “forests” teach us about resilience? Can community gardens and “plant-ins” be effective tools of social and environmental justice? Are “weeds” ever “good”? Do trees communicate and if so, what are they saying? Where do the boundaries between plants and people blur? This summer landscape architecture studio will challenge our assumptions about plants, people, place, and identity; and explore how can speculative botanical fictions advance transformative and tangible landscapes in uncertain times. Through readings, workshops, fieldtrips, and design experimentations, students will cultivate critical creativities; and familiarities | proficiencies in plant identification, propagation and pathology, urban foraging, guerilla gardening, speculative landscapes, material construction, and design communication. Final (built) projects will be exhibited at the annual Seattle Design Festival August 20-26 https://seadesignfest.org/about-sdf-faq/