| Spring 2008 Graduate Courses |
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Offered Course List | Spring 2008 Lower- and Upper-Division Courses LD ARCH 202 Two hours of lecture and six hours of studio per week. PREREQUISITES: 201 or consent of instructor. A site design studio stressing the shaping and coordination of ideas from initial concept to complete design of open space in various contexts. Typical projects will be of an intermediate scale and might include a park, plaza, museum sculpture garden, playground, office park, or housing project. Modules on social factors and planting design are included. Extended Course Description This studio will engage the students in a series of hands-on, experiential investigation of a specific site, emphasizing physical, as well as intellectual methods in the analysis and response to the making of place. This will include the devising, construction and installation of structures or actions that illuminate, celebrate, or provoke new facets of awareness about the site, and will require students to develop multi-sensory tools of notation and information gathering, in the process of achieving this activation. Students will have an opportunity to go beyond abstract conceptual design and to develop personal prototypical works that test design assumptions in a real-world situation. Based on the results acquired during the first part of the class, students will then prepare a proposal for a hypothetical “permanent” project presented in the form of two and three dimensional products, and may take the form of an actual, temporary on site installation. LD ARCH 204 Three hours of lecture and six hours of studio per week. PREREQUISITES: 201 or consent of instructor.Special topics in the design and planning of the landscape. The focus of the studio varies from semester to semester. Possible topics include community design, educative environments, landscape as art, park design, or energy-conserving design. For current offerings, see department announcement. LD ARCH 205 Three hours of lecture and six hours of studio per week. PREREQUISITES: 201 or consent of instructor. Application of environmental planning principles to a complex problem involving a variety of environmental criteria and desired land uses in a complex institutional and political setting. Student teams will identify needed data, assess environmental developmental problems, weigh competing uses, and prepare an environmental management plan. Extended Course Description The focus of this studio is creating designs, plans, policy and regulation for sustainable development. We will deal with a variety of scales: the small site, urbanizing community, and the active bioregion. We will work as a professional team. The plans we develop will be informed by environmental and social science especially biodiversity and community development. We will address economic development and environmental protection as one. We will make plans that address some of the most critical environmental issues of our time – rising sea level, endangered species, unsustainable urban form, and loss of wetlands, agricultural lands and cultural diversity. We will give equal attention to visionary plans and planning within cultural realities. The intent is to envision radically different futures yet develop practical plans that are more resilient than present trends. This requires that we first articulate our dreams and then attend to public, private and voluntary sectors while focusing on ecologically sound and impelling choices. Our laboratory will include California and the world. We will work with people, extensively with and on the land. GIS will inform us. Remote and up-close sensing will be required. We will taste sacred places, fish heads, multiple geometries, environmental justice, conservation biology, gestalts, exotic and familiar food and the politics of sustainability. We will draw, map, plan and design. Neither planning that leads to mushy policy nor design that only addresses superficial symptoms will be tolerated. Both planners and designers are welcome. Advanced students from many different disciplines interested in designing for change are welcome. We may have follow-up trips to present our results, but you should not choose this studio on the basis of exotic travel. This class will focus on plan making for real places and real people. Planners typically approach environmental planning from a broad cross-disciplinary viewpoint with remote mapping, policy, regulation and institutional change as primary methods. Designers usually approach environmental planning from the opposite end: the grassroots and detailed design of locality. Primary methods are the geometries of everyday life, justice and provincial values and the sensual aspects of place. A good environmental activist combines both and overcomes policy that is placeless and superficial design that misses the big picture issues. The result is the creative integration of large ecosystem thinking and experiential design. In recent years, students have attacked and solved some impossibly complex, difficult, and wickedly political issues. This spring, we will deal with similar problems. We will use Design for Ecological Democracy to guide us. We will practice the long zoom, design details and the bioregion. We will cross disciplines. We will combine reason and passion, privacy and community, native wisdom and abstract knowledge, density and limited extent. LD ARCH 206 Three hours of lecture and six hours of studio per week. PREREQUISITES: 252 and graduate standing. This is a spring studio for students to work on final projects (theses and professional reports). The studio, including lectures by the instructor, is meant to train and assist students in thesis or professional project research and help them in finalizing their thesis or professional report topic. The course includes weekly exercises ranging from writing articles documenting, illustrating, and critiquing landscapes to finally producing a thesis or professional report. Extended Course Description This is the final course in the thesis prep series. The meetings are infrequent but a schedule with strict deadlines is set to keep students on course with their thesis/professional project. During the semester students will produce a full second draft complete with graphics and citations, and final thesis/professional report for submission to the Graduate Division or LAEP Department. Tutorials on editing, layout, and publishing are offered. Students present final work to faculty and produce a show of work for family during graduation weekend. Course Format Prerequisites Objectives LD ARCH 222 Three hours of lecture and two hours of laboratory per week plus three days of weekend field trips. This course presents an overview of relevant hydrologic, hydraulic, and geomorphic processes, to provide the planner and ecologist with insight sufficient to coordinate with technical specialists in the field of hydrology. In addition, relevant regulations and policies are reviewed. Extended Course Description This course presents an overview of relevant hydrologic, hydraulic, and geomorphic processes, to provide the planner and ecologist with insight sufficient to coordinate with technical specialists in the field of hydrology. The course is not intended to duplicate more specialized courses offered in such fields as engineering hydrology, coastal engineering, or geology, but rather to provide an integrated overview. The course takes a process- and field-based approach to hydrology, emphasizes interdisciplinary perspectives, and reviews relevant regulations and public policies. Course Format The course covers these topics: There is an all-day weekend field trip in the SF Bay area in February, and a two-day weekend field trip to the Russian and Garcia Rivers in April. LD ARCH 223 One hours of lecture/discussion per week plus two field trips (total of four days). Must be taken on a satisfactory/unsatisfactory basis. Introduction to the ecology, visual characteristics, land use, and design history of the major landscape regions in California. Extended Course Description Course description Format Prerequisites Enrollment Required Text Materials Required Grading LD ARCH 225 Three hours of lecture per week plus two one-day field trips. Introduction to the field of urban forestry, its history, and its role in contemporary towns and cities. Emphasis on planning and management of the urban forest, restoration of old parks, street trees, and community participation. Extended Course Description Review of the history, character, planning, and management of trees in urban area. Trees will be studied in a variety of urban environments (e.g. street trees, parks, forested open-space areas, cemeterie, water’s edge, waste areas). Topics in this course include the values of trees in cities, urban ecology, urban forest planning, management of trees in urban areas, idenification of commonly used street and park trees in the Bay area, design considerations for streets and boulevards, role of trees in the reduction of air pollutants, effects of urban trees on hydrology, mangaing trees or fire hazard reduction, cost-benefit analysis of urban trees, community participation in urban forestry, and research directions in urban forestry. This course will include two Saturday field trips. Students will be required to complete four projects during the semester: (1) tree journal, (2) street tree description, (3) street tree inventory, and (4) urban forest plan. Prerequisites Enrollment limited to 25 students. Required Text Grading Grading Option LD ARCH 228 Two hours of seminar bi-weekly. PREREQUISITES: Open to all graduate students interested in the field. Course may be repeated for credit. Must be taken on a satisfactory/unsatisfactory basis. This course consists of (1) presentation by students of proposals, progress reports, and final results of their independent research projects, and (2) reviews of recently published research papers in the field. Students review recent issues of specific journals for all papers relevant to environmental river planning, management and restoration, and report on the papers to the seminar, broadly reviewing all the relevant papers and going into depth on one. Emphasis is on research methods and new findings. Oral presentation skills are also critiqued. Requirement: one or two oral presentations, accompanied by a 2-page handout. Extended Course Description Offered most Fall and Spring terms, open to graduate students interested in the field with instructor permission. Must be taken on S/U basis, can be repeated for credit. This course is a graduate seminar consisting of Requirements LD ARCH 232 Three hours of lecture per week and two field trips (total of three days). Visual and cultural analysis of landscapes, inventory procedures for "place" values, and problems related to sustainable design development, with special emphasis on highly valued places. Offered every third year. Extended Course Description Why Sacred Landscapes? The environments we create represent the best possible lives we can achieve. Built and Preserved environments concretize our private and collective desires and pursuits, most precisely expressing our values. Some values are concretized in specific places, the places we value most, those we designate sacred. But many values, like the pursuit of freedom of private movement are concretized in the landscape not as sacred designations but as side effects. The landscape–sacred and profane–reflects our noblest values, our basest values and our thoughtless values. This course explores how values are expressed in the built environment and specifically how place values can be purposively used to design landscapes. There are many reasons for designers to study sacred places. First, we now know that designers are captive to their place values, positively as a source of inspiration and negatively as a limit or source of inappropriateness. Studying our place values can free us. Second, place values have been and are key to environmental preservation, witness National Parks and Monuments, wetlands and wildlife corridors. Every landscape architect should understand the basis of these values in order to be an effective conservationist. Third, sacred places offer spiritual nourishment and health benefits. Both spiritual nourishment and health benefits are and could be more powerful motivators in environmental decision-making and design, especially for one who wishes to design places that touch peoples’ hearts. Fourth, place values likely are the foundation of a formal aesthetic more powerful than surface proportion and style. This is especially important in designing with nature where the messiness of life and death conflicts with the prevailing antiseptic efficiency. Fifth, an understanding of mobility, status and unrestricted property rights empowers one to address those most critical environmental problems associated with unsustainable values. Sixth, conversely an understanding of positive place values allows the planner and designer to connect neutral sustainable place actions as riders to valued actions or better understanding the values held in a democratic society allows the planner and designer to build on the noblest ones to create visionary change. This is what underlies the success of power plays like those of Robert Moses, Joe Edmiston, and Bill Mott. This also underlies goal setting as a design strategy. Seventh, the study of place values may be the most direct means to comprehend the fuzzy but critically important “sense of place” and place and placelessness in a scientific and useful way. Course Objectives Assignments In addition there will be assignments as follows: LD ARCH 251 Two hours of seminar per week. The focus will be on debate and discussion of central ideas in landscape architecture and environmental planning, drawing on primary literature over many decades of thought. This is not a history course, but it will include some literature that goes back to the early years of the field. This course covers the breadth of thinking in the field, including both environmental planning and landscape design as well as other sub disciplines. Each week students will lead a debate on a different theoretical issue. Extended Course Description The purpose of this seminar course is to become familiar with major ideas and thinkers in landscape architecture and environmental planning through discussion and debate of primary literature in the field. Although this is not a history course, it will include some literature that goes back to the early years of the field and that represents the breadth of thinking in both environmental planning and landscape design, as well as other sub disciplines. Each week students will lead a debate and discussion on a different theoretical issue based on the assigned readings for that week. All students must read all readings and participate in the discussions. Topics Course Requirements Text LD ARCH 252A Two hours of session per week. PREREQUISITES: Proposal must be submitted prior semester and approved by LAEP Curriculum Committee. Students learn research methods including social factors, historical/archival, design exploration, master planning, theoretical, and scientific field work. Students develop a conceptual framework, survey instrument, literature review, and detailed work plan. A full committee and funding proposal due on the last day of class. Extended Course Description The primary purpose of the thesis seminar is to provide students with a framework for developing a thesis or professional project topic. Course walks students through the process of selecting a topic, conducting a literature review, developing methods, and preparing a full proposal. The seminar is offered for graduate students prior to their final year, in order that some work can be done during the summer months. Prerequisites Objectives LD ARCH 253 One and one-half hours of lecture per week. Course may be repeated for credit. Must be taken on a satisfactory/unsatisfactory basis. Invited lectures on current research, planning practice, and design projects. Out of approximately 14 presentations per term, typically two or three would be by department faculty, two or three by graduating students, the remainder by outside speakers. Extended Course Description This semester's colloquium is an informal lecture series with speakers from academic and professional backgrounds addressing ecological design, landscape ecology, landscape design, urban design, environmental restoration, sustainable planning and environmental justice in the built environment. Speakers will present national and international perspectives. The success of the class relies on the participation and engagement between the students and the presenters. In addition to coming every week, there is a short questionnaire that you must fill out to receive credit. LD ARCH 254 One to five hours of seminar per week. Course may be repeated for credit as topic varies. Designed to be a forum for presentation of student research, discussions with faculty researchers and practitioners, and examination of topical issues in landscape architecture and environmental planning. Topics will be announced at the beginning of each semester. LD ARCH 255 PREREQUISITES: Doctoral Student or consent of instructor. Course may be repeated for credit. Must be taken on a satisfactory/unsatisfactory basis. Designed to be a forum for presentation of doctoral student research, discussions with faculty researchers and environmental planning practitioners, and examination of topical issues in environmental planning. Topics will be announced at the beginning of each semester. Extended Course Description This course will be a forum for discussion of urban design and environmental planning, theory, as well as research topics of mutual interest to members of the class. Each session will focus on the work of a particular scholar in the field with presentations by advanced doctoral students, faculty, and professionals. The agenda will be established with the input of students. Evening meetings of about 2 hours will be held alternate weeks, probably at the instructor's home if the class is small. LD ARCH 256 CANCELLED LD ARCH 257 One to three hours of seminar per week. PREREQUISITES: Graduate standing or consent of instructor. Course may be repeated for credit as topic varies. Research seminar on selected topics in landscape design. Seminars will focus on the theoretical foundations and practical applications of design and planning methods as well as emerging issues in the discipline. Seminars will include lectures by the faculty member offering the course, guest lecturers, student presentations, and discussions. Readings and requirements vary from year to year based on the topic and instructor. LD ARCH 258 Two hours of seminar every other week. Course may be repeated for credit. Must be taken on a satisfactory/unsatisfactory basis. This seminar studies California water issues from an interdisciplinary perspective, building upon the established California Colloquium on Water, to increase understanding and appreciation of water resources and contribute to informed decision-making about water in California. Each semester four distinguished scholars in the fields of humanities, natural sciences, engineering, social sciences, law, and environmental design present lectures to students, faculty, and the general public. Students in the seminar attend the colloquium lectures, complete background readings, and meet for two hours on alternate weeks in the seminar session to discuss issues raised by the colloquium presentations and related readings. Course requirements: attendance at colloquia, attendance and participation in seminars, completion of course readings, brief written critiques of lectures, and a short presentation of literature relevant to colloquium topics. Extended Course Description This seminar studies California water issues from an interdisciplinary perspective, building upon the established California Colloquium on Water, to increase understanding and appreciation of water resources and contribute to informed decision-making about water in California. Each semester, four distinguished scholars in the fields of humanities, natural sciences, engineering, social sciences, law, and environmental design present lectures to students, faculty and the general public. Students in the seminar attend the Colloquium lectures, complete background readings, and meet for two hours on alternate weeks in seminar session to discuss issues raised by the Colloquium presentations and related readings. Course Requirements FIRST MEETING: 2/21/08 at WRCA Library 410 O’Brien Hall LD ARCH 295 Hours to be arranged. PREREQUISITES: Graduate standing and appointment as a research assistant. Any combination of 295 or 297 may be taken for a total of six units maximum toward the M.L.A. degree. Must be taken on asatisfactory/unsatisfactory basis. Supervised experience on a research project in landscape architecture and/or environmental planning. Regular meetings with faculty sponsor required. See departmental sheet for other limitations. LD ARCH 296 Hours to be arranged. Three hours per unit. PREREQUISITES: Advancement to Ph.D. candidacy. Course may be repeated for credit. Must be taken on a satisfactory/unsatisfactory basis. Open to qualified students who have been advanced to candidacy for the Ph.D. degree and are directly engaged upon the doctoral dissertation. LD ARCH 297 Hours to be arranged. PREREQUISITES: Graduate standing and consent of instructor. Any combination of 295 or 297 may be taken for a total of six units maximum towards a M.L.A. degree. Must be taken on a satisfactory/unsatisfactory basis. Supervised experience relative to specific aspects of practice in landscape architecture and/or environmental planning. Regular meetings with faculty and outside sponsor as well as final report required. See departmental information sheet for other limitations. LD ARCH 298 Hours to be arranged. Course may be repeated for credit. Special group studies. Topics to be announced at the beginning of each semester. LD ARCH 299 Hours to be arranged. PREREQUISITES: Graduate standing and consent of instructor. Course may be repeated for credit. Research work conducted preparatory to completion of the thesis or professional project as well as other approved research. A maximum of six units will be counted toward the M.L.A degree. The six units allows for four units maximum for thesis or professional project research, and two units maximum for other approved research. See departmental information sheet for other limitations. LD ARCH 300 Hours to be arranged. PREREQUISITES: Graudate standing and appointment as a teaching assistant. Course may be repeated for credit. Must be taken on a satisfactory/unsatisfactory basis. |