Landscape Architecture Work Featured in International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam Exhibition
This fall, work by Associate Professor Phoebe Lickwar and landscape architecture students was displayed at the 2024 International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR) exhibition, “Nature of Hope.” Held every other year, the IABR presents an extensive cultural program of exhibitions, debates, lectures, workshops, and tours, with work from around the world, drawing attention to the value of research by design.
The 2024 exhibition, held at the Nieuwe Institut — Netherlands’ national museum for architecture, design, and digital culture — featured over 70 curated works that sparked hope, inspiration, and discussion around the ways in which we can contribute to and influence positive change in our environment.
Developed in collaboration with Rosetta S. Elkin, a practitioner and professor of landscape architecture at Pratt Institute, Lickwar and Elkin’s entry “Everything Change: Instructions for Land-based Learning” represented both an experiment in teaching design and a call for radical collaboration between practitioner-scholars and students.
“Everything Change is an expression we borrowed from Canadian poet and novelist Margaret Atwood as an inspiration to enlarge how we think about the changing climate,” said Lickwar. “The initial prompt for the project, ‘How can we strengthen studio-based learning with land-based learning?’ stemmed from a shared concern that design pedagogy has become overly reliant on learning by proxy and that our contemporary moment calls for new structures, methods and approaches that connect us more directly to the land and to each other.”
The exploration began as a Spring 2024 seminar taught by Elkin at Pratt Institute, where students studied how architectural education can be informed by practices and histories of land-based learning. Drawing on learners’ lived experiences, land-based learning is a pedagogic model where curricular material is derived from particular landscapes and informed by a hands-on engagement with materials and the land. Lickwar guest lectured for students in the course, sharing a pedagogical approach she has developed in her seminar Drawing Entanglements, where students employ a variety of drawing practices to study contested urban landscapes. Other guests in the course included Kiel Moe, Abra Lee, Thaisa Way, Anette Freytag, and John Koepke. As Pratt students worked on testing their ideas in Brooklyn, NY, Lickwar invited UT Austin landscape architecture students to test their ideas here in Austin.
As Lickwar and Elkin explain in their exhibition materials: “It turns out that teaching/learning no longer relies on a proficiency with physical materials and real places, but on ever-evolving technologies that trust in functional substitution, abstracting real-world dynamics with a miniaturization of reality. The result is a generation of students that are skilled in how to sell projects, not in how to make them, without the tools to care for what they imagine or create.”
As part of the work, students developed their own “instructions” for land-based learning, short exercises that instruct the reader in engagements with plant life, soils, water, or wind. They were then asked to test each other’s instructions and to film their work in the field. Lickwar and Elkins developed and authored their own collection of instructions inspired by the students’ work, publishing them with references for further reading in a booklet. The student videos were compiled into a 7-minute film for the exhibition. Both the booklet and the film are available on the project website: https://www.land-basedlearning.com/
“There’s a lot about decolonization in the work. It’s not just a question of tools and technologies, but of centering marginalized bodies of knowledge that will reshape the future of design pedagogy,” Lickwar explains. “We felt it was important for this to be a collaboration with students. Everything Change is not about returning to pedagogies of the past. It is about reinventing how we teach and learn in an uncertain future and that is a project that must be done together with our students.”
Project collaborators include: Assistant Professors Dane Carlson and Mariel Collard; Pratt Students: James Ervi, Peyton Floyd, Tiana Gentry, Nell Heidinger, Mirabel Hickman, Noelle Ladue, Jamie Latimer, Ezra A. Lee, Andrew Mercier, Chase Mitchell, Patrick Ruvo, and Bowen Tang; UT Austin Students: Kesari Fleury, Nicki Fry, Leah Gundrum, Justin Halloran, Erin Kim, Jesse Maniccia, and Anthony Watley.
With the exhibition concluded, Lickwar and Elkins will continue their collaboration in a seminar, Land-Based Learning: Theory and Practice, offered by Lickwar at UT Austin in the spring 2025 semester. In their efforts to facilitate discussions and connections across schools and landscape architecture programs, Lickwar plans to once again engage UT School of Architecture students in her continued research.
