Life Off-Campus
This quarter was my first quarter living off-campus, and it was a significant upgrade from dorm life. While in the dorms I felt constrained by the anti-communal design of the dorms and the lack of connection I felt with some dorm members (some of that certainly due to my own self-defeating cynicism), I felt more free to create my own reality in my apartment with three of my close friends. I chose the smallest room at the very top of our apartment, with a distant view of some apartments that looks like a lake with my glasses off. I populated it with my posters, added string lights, and made my bed as cozy as possible. I’ve also grown a few house plants (something I want to expand in the spring) and planted some native plants in the small beds in front of our apartment.
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Although functionally it’s arguably a less communal environment than the dorms, and I’m living in a recent apartment controlled by disconnected corporate landlords likely built and controlled by some combination of soulless conglomerates, and the design of the apartment shows no concern for ecological sustainability or hardly anything else I value, having more control over my own living situation, more privacy and seclusion, and living with my friends made the apartment a much better place to live for my mental health.
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Despite being further away from the university and all the events that occur there, I don’t feel more disconnected from the community; at least, not in any way I don’t appreciate. I’ve gone to a lot of various events, from house shows to native plant planting parties, and have felt like I’m slowly growing more connections and finding my way toward a life that feels more and more aligned with my ideals.
The Landscape Architecture Program
This quarter was also my first year in the landscape architecture program, another radical shift in my experience at UW. Three of the four classes I took were almost entirely with other students within my cohort – students who entered the program the same year as I did. Most of the other students are graduate students – there are only seven or so other undergraduate students in our cohort. Although I was very excited to be fully immersed in my passion, the transition to the program was a difficult shift. The program began before classes with a week-long design prep week, consisting of morning sessions learning computer programs and afternoon sessions sketching at various sites throughout Seattle. This was fun but exhausting, especially paired with moving in and getting accustomed to living on my own, outside of the dorms, without the ease of a meal plan. We then had a brief break before the actual classes began.
The workload was drastically higher than the rest of my college education. All four classes assigned many projects, some more or less time-intensive than others. The workload was the highest in L ARCH 401, the introductory landscape architecture studio, which featured design/drawing projects assigned every week, sometimes multiple times a week. Many assignments were assigned on Fridays, due the following Monday. At the end of the quarter, while filling out course evaluations, I answered a question – how many hours per week do you spend on this class, in and out of class time? – with fellow students. The highest option was more than 22 hours per week, which we all immediately agreed was our answer, since we spent 12 hours in class alone a week, and likely even more in the studio after hours.
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The combination of an intense workload with many projects due in short succession, the time spent moving in and adjusting to the quarter, and a lack of understanding of just how much time I needed to commit to the landscape architecture program to succeed led me to several late nights in succession working on projects and, unsurprisingly, accompanying horrid mental health. After that first slew of projects, I spent more time in the studio and less at the apartment so I wouldn’t be caught in such a situation again, and regularly stayed at the studio to midnight or later. Although I certainly could have chosen to create lower quality work to get more sleep – something I’ve been working on so I can support my health – I frankly find the workload the program demands excessive, and I was far from the only student to struggle with this. As one student said toward the end of the program, design programs don’t have any respect for students’ time. There’s a common saying that students can have sleep, school, or a social life, but only two. In this program it feels like you can only have one, school. Besides the toll this has on students’ health, it affects working students even more, who have to choose to get by with work below their potential due to the time limit or choose to harm their health even more by cutting back on sleep and socializing. This also leads students to prioritize graded assignments, which practically means most students skim or skip readings entirely, creating design students who produce design without a deep understanding of why they’re designing and for whom. And, like many school programs, the excessive demands of the school studio prepare students to be exploited in the workforce with excessive hours and low wages as AutoCAD jockeys. This is clearly something I have strong feelings about, and something I hope to write about in the future (perhaps in the blog I’m hoping to create soon), but not something I expect to change anytime soon in a field and program obsessed with portraying itself as socially aware and less eager to make substantial changes to its structure.
However, despite its flaws, the landscape architecture program has a lot to love too – beyond the fact that its my primary passion. The students are very supportive and not in the least bit competitive, and the teachers are generally down to earth and supportive. It definitely feels like a community.
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L ARCH 401 – Introductory Design Studio
L ARCH 401, like I mentioned above, is the introductory design studio of the landscape architecture program. The professor of this class, Julie Parrett, took a very experiential and abstract approach to teaching, involving assignments in which we expressed spatial qualities of landscape through ‘a series of parallel lines’ and expressed wetness of sites through staining – applying dyes or stains to paper without touching the page directly. Although this approach was very interesting and broadened my perspective on how to observe and represent landscape, it was far from my usual design approach.
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I feel torn on it, since, on the one hand it is valuable to consider landscape in ways outside of the norm and experiential aspects of landscape are, well, how people experience landscape (not as a planting plan or grading detail, for instance). On the other hand, the methods of representation felt inaccessible, as they needed to be explained to others for them to understand and often were linked with jargon of the field. The sorts of observation we were doing also seemed generally limited to human experience of place as a spatial experience, which is only one way to observe landscape. For a program touted as ‘urban ecological design’, I hoped for an introductory class that involved ecological observation – reading landscapes for histories, patterns of plant growth and fauna interactions, and other such skills. Despite the value I see in creating enjoyable experiences of place for people, I can’t help but feel that this approach (especially as a foundational piece of design, the focus of our first class) is woefully insufficient to the challenges our society faces. In twenty or thirty years, most people won’t be worried about the spatial experience of private parks or gardens (it could be argued that most people don’t care about that today!), they’ll care about their ability to shelter from heatwaves or floods, their ability to find a haven in urban environments that are often designed to exclude the needy, their ability to get to their house or place of work in a safe and pleasant fashion, or simply their ability to access a joyous space to gather with friends. Although I often remind myself of the need for beauty in landscapes and people’s aesthetic experiences despite the practical challenges that often feel more pressing, it is hard to feel that an approach that centers individual spatial experience is needed, especially in a field that traditionally caters to wealthy clients and the needs of wealthy, usually white city-dwellers.
Despite my critiques of the workload and focus of this course, I still found many of the projects interesting and fun at times, especially the last project where I considered restoration of the creek flows of Ravenna Park, and I had many opportunities to work on my representation skills in this course.
L ARCH 431 – Landform and GradinG
My favorite class I took this quarter was L ARCH 431 – Landform and Grading. When I ran cross country in high school, I found that although I am fast relative to the general population, I am a slow cross country runner. Similarly, although I’m good at math in the general population, I would struggle with the math courses required of civil engineers or computer scientists, but I do quite well in math courses for landscape architects. In this course, we looked at a variety of grading problems to learn technical skills for constructing landscapes, from grading swales and culverts to grading staircases. I found this all very interesting and the puzzle-like math and spatial thinking of the assignments fun. Also, in contrast to L ARCH 401, it was very clear to me that this course advanced my ability to design and construct landscapes.
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My main gripe with this course is that it felt disconnected with green building techniques, something that I hope will be included in future classes in the construction series since the class didn’t focus on materials. While we worked on various designs, roads were assumed to be made of asphalt and paths and culverts of concrete (materials which emit a lot of greenhouse gases in construction), and although we did drain to a rain garden for our final project, many aspects of the teaching on drainage focused on draining to stormwater systems, which struggle with issues of flooding and disconnect water from its ability to sustain life. If we learn or consider green building techniques in our more theoretical classes but aren’t able to construct them, how will we implement them in practice? Although I’m not worried about my own ability to design the sorts of landscapes I want to see in the world – I have a very specific vision and seek many ways to learn about it within and beyond the classroom – I am worried about a curriculum that does not sufficiently prepare students for the challenges our society faces. In order to avoid significantly increased global temperatures and more and more cataclysmic climatic changes and resulting social crises from waves of climate refugees to wars over resources, we have to bring emissions (not net emissions, all emissions) to practically zero as soon as possible. How are we even going to reduce current emissions at all if programs intimately tied to these issues do not teach ways to build in radically more sustainable ways?
My final project sections for L ARCH 431. Partially because we didn't learn much about construction yet, I designed a very excessive concrete pour here. However, I tried to angle the project to my own education goals by designing a combined ramp and stair (which provides ADA access without separating ADA paths excessively) and designing a local rock wall instead of a concrete wall.
Education Beyond the Program
As I stated above, I’ve been working on viewing my education as beyond what I learn in the classroom, so I’ve continued to go to a variety of ecology-related events within the university and beyond. Many of these have been incredibly inspiring, and kept my passion and hope alive in a program that sometimes feels constraining to my own particular vision. I’ll highlight two of these events to give a sense of what I experienced.
I attended a talk by UW architecture professor Elizabeth Golden on housing for a warming climate. She presented an incredibly inspiring vision of a cooperative housing development in Arizona on the site of a former golf course. This (theoretical) development is built from earthen blocks and provides a range of housing options from apartment living to small single family homes. Besides materials, the designs incorporated ecological design through passive cooling that uses the physics of air flow to curtail the need for AC (similar to what I learned at the Earthship Academy). Ecological design with a strong emphasis on community (needed for true ecological living) made the presentation fascinating to me, but the connections to her real-life work made it even more exciting. She showed several precedents – one, a housing unit in Niamey, Niger which utilized traditional earth building techniques (a project she designed) and the other a program in Tucson where people in extreme poverty were given the opportunity to make earthen bricks for a wage. Both showed the ability to weave ecological living with community for everyone’s benefit.
Later in the quarter, I attended a Duwamish River kayak cleanup event with two of my friends. I piloted a kayak with one of those friends and picked trash out of the Duwamish River, a place one of the event hosts described as (something like) ‘the underbelly of capitalism’. Before we got out onto the river, I watched as a giant boat carried thousands of flattened junk cars. I was struck by the sheer scale of the systems we live in and the destruction and waste they create. It’s one thing to step into a supermarket and be struck by how much plastic waste is involved; it’s another to see behind the curtain (per se) at the accumulated waste over years, across many places. I can only hope that those cars were heading for a recycling facility of some sort.
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Despite sobering sights such as this, the event was a lot of fun and a good way to both spend time with friends and do something good. I picked up a lot of trash with my friend, and copiloting the boat was a fun exercise in team-building (another event organizer referred to kayaks as something like ‘divorce boats’). My friend and I pulled a mattress out of some reeds and attempted to pull it across the Duwamish River, but were cut short by a massive tugboat that pushed it far from us.
Although these events don’t always provide tangible skills in the same way my classes can, they build my ecological understanding and awareness and keep me in touch with the sorts of work I want to do, and, maybe most importantly, they keep me passionate enough about this path to keep me going on it.
Taking Off My Boots to Sink My Toes in the Mud: A Quarter in Retrospect
For a while, one of my personal mottos has been 'eyes on the sky, boots on the ground' - in essence, keep moving forward while keeping your eyes set on something greater than your surroundings. I apply this to anything from my personal life to my hopes and dreams for a better world and everything in between. Looking over my last few reflections (and thinking back on all I omitted from them), I notice that my thinking or mindset has stayed more or less the same (at least, in its most ideal state - not when I'm plagued by intrusive thoughts or feeling especially cynical) while my emotion or experience has felt more and more at ease. I retain all the concerns I've had for years or, in some cases, since childhood about the future of our country and world as well as my struggles to build community, but I feel more content with the way things are. I do my best to still act in a helpful way when I feel less hope or contentment, but lately it's felt easier to trust the process. I feel like I'm taking off my metaphorical boots to enjoy the present moment more, while still moving forward. There are still so many unknowns, but I'm seeing good signs from all the love I've shared with my roommates, new connections I've made this quarter, and exciting opportunities that have come my way (which I hope to write about in future reflections). As I take a break from the hectic environment of school and huddle for warmth in my childhood home for winter, I cherish the time I have to reflect and be alone but look forward to seeing what the new year brings. Dear reader, I hope you've found solace and joy this year too, and I wish you a happy new year.