MLA1 – Learning to See and Share

Studio 1 emphasizes building landscape literacy and instilling a sense of agency within students early in the curriculum. First, students learn to read, interpret, and draw the components, systems, processes and interactions of the built and natural landscape around them. Then, they engage with their own ability to alter the inner workings of that landscape through simple, but meaningful intervention. After carefully studying a local post-industrial landscape through various drawing and modeling exercises, students design their own strange terrains that take advantage of the processes, relationships and dynamic systems they have become very familiar with. The studio introduces landscape as the tangible, alter-able places we engage with every day, grounding and giving students power to act. Students leave the studio with an intelligence and confidence about terrain, the forces and processes that shape it, and how those forces and processes can be leveraged through design.