On Walking and Fieldwork

ARC466H1 F
Instructor: Jane Wolff
Meeting Section: L0101
Fall 2022

Structured around weekly walks (rain or shine!), this field-based course begins from the premise that every landscape tells many stories—if we know how to read them. Its goal is to help students build landscape literacy, the ability to decipher a landscape’s layered systems, trace their origins, and make sense of their meanings. The practices of field observation, documentation, and analysis set the terms for design. Creating resilient proposals has always depended on a deep understanding of what already exists, and why, and the climate emergency makes the stakes higher and higher.

Work in the course will include walking; field recording using drawing, writing, photography, and time-based media; reading; and developing synthetic documents that illuminate, elaborate on, and advance discoveries made in the field.