Landscape Architecture Orientation Seminar

Catalog description

Introductory seminar involving readings on significant issues in landscape architecture. LARCH majors only. LARCH 125 Landscape Architecture Orientation Seminar (1) LARCH 125 is a seminar course, the first of many in an entering student's Penn State career. Seminar classes offer the opportunity to read, think, share ideas through informal discussion, and refine personal thoughts reflection. The seminar is a common and useful tool to explore important ideas and develop critical thinking skills. The design and theory sequence begins with the freshman seminar, LARCH 125 , which introduces students to landscape architecture issues.In this seminar students read and discuss the challenges and opportunities faced by contemporary landscape architects. To support student explorations, the class undertakes a series of readings of seminal works in landscape architecture and allied field that students carefully consider, question, and discuss. As a major part of student evaluation, they maintain a journal of their evolving ideas about the course content. Entering landscape architecture majors sometimes have a restricted notion of the wide variety of career directions that face them within the field of landscape architecture. This class proposes that the principal role of the landscape designer and planner is to make "place"; - a combination of physical, cultural and compositional cues that imbue built and natural forms with meaning. The goal of this first-year seminar class is for students to understand the type, or types, of place that landscape can be. The course introduces students to concepts of landscape as place, and asks them to ponder, explore, and respond to ideas about various perspectives on landscape "place"; This introduces them to the broad range of issues and activities that are addressed in the seemingly simple term, landscape architecture. Course Objectives: a) To become familiar with important issues in contemporary landscape architecture. b) To exercise and hone skills in critical thinking. c) To exercise and hone skills in speaking and writing persuasively. d) To begin to explore roles as future place makers.