Land Practice

Catalog description

This seminar introduces students to the relevant topics, themes, and sites that help us understand the conception, production, and evolution of designed landscapes throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, with a focus on North America. We aim to build an understanding of landscapes as both physical spaces and cultural constructions at the nexus of art and science. We also explore how our understanding of landscapes contributes meaning to our relationships with nature and more-than-human species. The seminar examines the development of the designed landscape in the United States, beginning with Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) and foregrounding the entangled roles of the plantation economy, Indigenous knowledge, and colonialism. The study of Andrew Jackson Downing and Frederick Law Olmsted presents an entry point for examining the landed gentry and the laboring classes through Olmsted’s nineteenth-century journalist’s perspective in The Cotton Kingdom (1861) as well as the public health narratives that emerged with the construction of Central Park on the cusp of the Civil War. The early twentieth-century development of national parks and the narrative of the American wilderness are considered as parallel to the ongoing displacement of Indigenous peoples; the course also examines contemporary scholarship on traditional ecological knowledge and pluriverse worldviews. An expanded view of urban ecology and landscape performance will bring us to the launch of the environmental movement and the first Earth Day, held in Philadelphia at Fairmont Park in 1970. Literature, poetry, and performance art are included as part of a holistic approach to reading and exploring land practice. Meeting once a week in a three-hour block, this seminar uses the extended time to offer engaged active learning and rich discussions, as well as for a…