This course is designed to endow students with foundational authoring skills in digital media and analog processes with which to engage the materiality, spatiality and temporality of landscape while concurrently introducing the lineage of landscape representation and its theoretical foundations. Through iterative and translatory processes of making, students will develop the ability to operate between analog and digital processes, between two and three dimensions, between given and introduced conditions, between static and dynamic states, and across scales. Course readings and lectures will examine how certain techniques of imaging the biophysical world impact the way in which we interpret, understand and eventually shape our surroundings and how these techniques relate to larger conceptual shifts in our cultural imaginary.   

FALL 2023 TOPIC: BIOMATERIALS

As we race through our planet-scarce resources to sustain the appetite of consume-and-dispose culture, the need to reevaluate our non-regenerative processes of existence becomes increasingly more urgent. Our collective response to climate stress will require not just innovative tools and technologies, but social and economic transformation – a shift in our thinking about the biophysical world and our role and responsibility in it.

This course will introduce students to an ethically oriented practice of biodesign - investigating the opportunities that this emerging area of practice affords, particularly as it relates to current and impending climate-related catastrophes. The course will familiarize students with new materials, fabrication, and prototyping techniques to develop novel biodesign proposals, while exposing students to advanced research and methods informed by current conversations within life sciences, biological design, synthetic biology, bio-arts, interaction design, and other relevant emerging topics. This year’s topic will focus on material ecologies, circularity, regenerative systems, and biomaterials.

ARCH540 is associated with the Landscape Futures Lab at the School of Architecture. As such, we will be drawing from and collaborating with its affiliate faculty and with our partners on this project, including the Biodesign Challenge and Shannon Robinson, head librarian of the USC Architecture & Fine Arts Library. Material samples produced by students throughout the duration of this course will be donated to the Architecture & Fine Arts Library to start their first pilot bio-based material sample collection!

Students with the most provocative and thorough projects at the end of the semester will represent USC at the Biodesign Challenge competition held in NYC at the Parsons School of Design and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)! The annual Summit is scheduled for June 2024.

This is a hands-on, practice-based course, open to all disciplines and levels.

The final of the “core” studios, the scale moves into the territorial dimension, and tackles existential threats caused by one or more impacts of anthropocentrism – climate volatility, species extinctions, soil depletion, sea-level rise, air/water contamination, deforestation/desertification, etc. Working across scales, students will generate both site-specific strategies and replicable principles that can be deployed in multiple contexts. The studio will synthesize the material of landscape with economic, infrastructural, technological, scientific, social and cultural systems to generate ideas that have the potential for policy impact. 

View the Spring 2020 Virtual EXPO Gallery

As the second media requirement for landscape architecture, this course is aimed at introducing various physical, digital and spatial modeling methods as generative means of structuring design proposals. Through translatory processes of making – using physical, digital and durational media – students will develop techniques to explore both the expression and experience of landscape as a three-dimensional medium. The course focuses on the synergy between materiality, form, structure, surface and space, their processes of production and assembly, and the effects that the interaction between physical systems and landscape phenomena produce. The course is therefore organized into the following parts: the expression of landscape as three-dimensional form (physicality); the experience of being in and moving through landscape as a three dimensional space (immersion), tied together by the use of digital media as the means to move from physical models into spatio-temporal environments (translation). Students will gain skills in hand and digital modeling (Rhino + plug-ins), digital fabrication (3D printing, CNC milling), and animation (Lumion and similar). 

This course will introduce students to an ethically-oriented practice of biodesign - investigating the opportunities that this emerging area of practice affords, particularly as it relates to current and impending climate-related catastrophes. Our collective response to climate stress will require not just innovative tools and technologies, but social and economic transformation – a shift in our thinking about the biophysical world and our role and responsibility in it. As such, new modes of practice are necessitated. The course will familiarize students with new materials, fabrication, and prototyping techniques to develop novel biodesign proposals, while exposing students to advanced research and methods informed by current conversations within life sciences, biological design, synthetic biology, bio-arts, interaction design, and other relevant emerging topics. This year’s topic will focus on the disappearing worlds of the Audubon and processes of co-design that yield emergent habitats and expanded dwellings for-and-with companion bird species.