LAR 347R / LAR 385 / CRP 389C / U D 381E Seminar
Wed 9:00am – 12:00pm, SUT 3.126
Open to all SOA students
Phoebe Lickwar: plickwar@utexas.edu
In recent decades, design education has favored proxy environments over real places, reinforcing a distrust of land-based knowledge and experience. Students are skilled in selling projects but lack the knowledge and skills to make proposals grounded in physical environments. The dominance of substitution, abstraction, and miniaturization in design education reinforces a deep disconnection between learners and land. Such estrangement has grave consequences for a generation of students who are challenged to build a better world.
This seminar explores land-based learning as a corrective to learning by proxy in the design studio or classroom and as a tool for decolonization in design education. Land-based learning describes pedagogic models where curricular material is derived from particular landscapes and informed by the learners’ lived experience. The course centers indigenous ways of knowing, feminist theories of belonging, and other critical pedagogies that exist at the margins of mainstream design education. The course asks students to consider how these theories might inform the development of new creative practices leading to greater intimacy with air, water, and earth, and with the life that inhabits these realms.
The seminar will be conducted as a collaboration between invited practitioner-scholars and students across the disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, community and regional planning, urban design, and interior design. Class discussions will be organized around weekly reading assignments, and invited guests will share their work related to these topics. Participants will share resources to expand the course bibliography and will work together to develop a series of instructions in land-based learning.
