LAN3200H S
Instructors: Jane Wolff
Meeting Section: LEC0101
Fridays, 12:00 PM - 3:00 PM

This seminar will investigate public art practices as opportunities for building public landscape literacy. Contemporary large-scale landscapes are complicated, and because their circumstances don’t fall into conventional categories of nature and culture, they’re hard to decipher. They face pressing forces for change from the climate emergency, environmental injustice, sprawling urbanization, failing infrastructure, and the need for truth and reconciliation with Indigenous peoples. In North America, where planners and designers have limited power, landscapes’ futures rest on the aggregated decisions of individuals, markets, and governments, but the absence of nuanced, widely shared language for the hybrid conditions of the Anthropocene limits public discussion about values, choices, and ways forward.

Public Art as Landscape Scholarship springs from a question: what can design do in arenas designers don’t control? It will examine a possible course of action: the development of tools that help citizens and experts understand—and discuss—their own roles in the ecosystem. It will pursue the dissemination of those tools through public art venues, which are also useful venues for public engagement. It posits landscape literacy as a step toward agency.

Working across the boundary of public art and landscape scholarship, the course will examine recent precedents in and beyond Toronto. In parallel with that investigation, seminar members will participate in the conception and realization of a new public art project for landscape literacy. A collaboration with colleagues at UBC’s School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, the seminar will run jointly with a graduate course taught by Sara Jacobs and will include a possible field trip to Vancouver.