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?

Dr. 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 program 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.