In "Landscape Architecture Design Studio 2," graduate students learn to navigate the relationship between culture and landscape architecture. For their final assignment, students developed a landscape proposal for part of the Unviersity of Toronto campus. Each project was based on a theme related to Indigenous culture, like "ceremony" or "acknowledgement." Students were required to design at three different scales: district, street-level, and material detail. This semester's studio was taught by associate professor Liat Margolis and assistant professor Elise Shelley.

Tina Cui and Elva Hu

Tina and Elva write: "With the idea of the Indigenous community on campus in mind, this project aimed to create vibrant and lively outdoor spaces that could provide more opportunities for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous students, educators, and campus staff for gatherings, recreation, and ceremonies." Circles, which have symbolic significance in Indigenous culture, are a central motif of the design proposal.

Madison Appleby and Agata Mrozowski

Madison and Agata write: "Our project asks: what vernacular materials can we employ when designing for the west district of U of T campus to minimize the impacts of our ecological footprint? And how can we increase the porosity of material surfaces to relieve the pressures on the city’s infrastructure? How do we implement a design that looks at closed loop systems of material and economic flow?"

They answered these questions with a proposal to transform the University of Toronto's stretch of Willcocks Street into a pedestrian-only space lined with new programmatic elements, like "seams" filled with native grasses, and "social mounds" made of glacial erratic boulders.