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Landscape Architecture offered five design workshop studios to advanced BLA and MLA students. As in spring 2024, two of those groups undertook field trips out of state. At the end of March, Prof. Kate Holliday’s studio, Annihilator of Space, spent a week in New York City visiting key sites of telephone system infrastructure—both historical and contemporary—as well as some iconic works of landscape architecture and various museums with collections and exhibitions pertinent to the studio topic. Ph.D. candidate Stephen Ferroni traveled with the group to help with logistics, and alum Michael King (Ph.D. 2021) led the students on two substantial walking tours, one of memorial sites in Manhattan and the other covering Central Park and the vicinity of Lincoln Center.
Addressing the impacts of climate breakdown and the politics of environmental improvement in the Anthropocene age, Prof. Stephen Sears has been undertaking a series of design workshop studios centered on immersive experiences of old-growth forests. Last year, that involved a hiking and camping trip to the Lost Coast of Northern California. This spring, his students explored eight old-growth settings closer at hand, including two managed by the University of Illinois and six in Indiana.
The three other design workshop studios offered this spring focused on campus spaces in order to facilitate intensive, site-specific engagement. Prof. Beth Scott’s students developed and submitted an entry to the US EPA’s 2025 Campus Rainworks Challenge in the Master Planning category. The winners will be announced later this summer, and we have great confidence in our team!
In Shaping Comfort: Designing Microclimates for Inviting Outdoor Spaces, Prof. Zhihan Tao’s students used cutting-edge detection tools to collect site-based environmental data and ENVI-met 3D modeling software to simulate design scenarios as they imagined transforming a campus parking lot into a sustainable and thermally comfortable park.
Again this year, Prof. Conor O’Shea’s design workshop students used parametric and VR visualization tools to design and install a new native plants garden on campus—in this case, a large area along the south side of the Business Instructional Facility. The outcomes of Prof. O’Shea’s studio were celebrated by the Gies College of Business in a news item posted earlier this week.