Proseminar in Landscape Architecture

This required seminar introduces incoming MLA II post-professional candidates to contemporary debates in the field of landscape architecture. The seminar also serves as a venue for the post-professional cohort in the MLA Program, offering weekly discussion around topics attendant to contemporary discourse in the field internationally. In the Fall of 2013 the seminar will focus on the discourse around landscape architecture as a medium and a model for contemporary urbanism. Weekly readings, seminar presentations, and discussion will articulate the claim of landscape as urbanism in the context of economic, ecological, and cultural conditions shaping the field.

Over the semester members of the seminar will be introduced to a range of ideas, authors, agents, and actors shaping contemporary discourse in landscape architecture. Members of the seminar will come to know the diverse disciplinary, professional, and institutional identities of the field. Through a series of readings, seminar presentations, and discussions, members of the seminar will be introduced to the contemporary preoccupations of the study of landscape architecture at Harvard and be invited to articulate their own line of research in response to this.