Course Details

Course offered Winter 2018

L ARCH 353 B: Designing Landscapes in a Modern World: History of Modern Landscape Architecture (A&H / SSc)

L ARCH 353 B: Designing Landscapes in a Modern World: History of Modern Landscape Architecture (A&H / SSc)

SLN 16538 (View UW registration info »)

Thaisa Way (Landscape Architecture)
Office: 348F Gould Hall, Box 355734
Phone: 206 685-2523
Email: tway@uw.edu

Credits: 5
Limit: 5 students

Honors Credit Type

Second course in the L ARCH History series

You must register for lecture and section

The course investigates modernism, modernist theory, and the modern landscape architecture as process, product, and theory.

What makes a good urban landscape? A great public park? An inspiring work of landscape art? This course will explore the history of designing and creating gardens and landscapes in diverse cultures and
places as the profession and practice of landscape architecture has become a leading field in the design and creation of newly imagined city spaces and places. We will begin in the 19th century with Central Park, in New York City, one of the first public parks designed for the public and work our way up to the postindustrial parks and landscapes of the late 20th century. We will study small gardens that inspire the poet and large nature preserves, as well as city plazas, corporate roof gardens,
and the neighborhood park.

We will explore how modern art and architecture influence landscape design and in turn how environmental thinking influenced the push for sustainable cities. What does it mean to be modern? How does creativity shape the design of natural landscapes? This course provides an historic and critical overview of the evolution of modernism and modernist designs in terms of aesthetic, technological, social, and spiritual concerns in the built landscape. Moving between practice and theory, between design, as a creative art and as a way of thinking, we will consider diverse modernisms across the Americas and Europe.