2 week course
Sketch, map, and model your own outdoor space, and see how landscape architects design places for people, plants, and animals
| Landscape architecture is the design of outdoor places, from backyards and city streets to parks, waterfronts, and entire eco-regions. In this course, you’ll get a broad introduction to the discipline: its history, the range of projects landscape architects take on, and how they design public spaces that serve people and the environment. Through fieldwork, drawing, and model making, you’ll learn to observe a site, develop ideas, and present your own design for an outdoor space.
This is a hands-on introduction to a design field some may have never encountered, even though they use its work every day. You’ll learn the same tools landscape architects use, including sketching, modeling, digital illustration, digital fabrication, and fieldwork, and apply them to real outdoor spaces.The course is taught by UConn landscape architecture faculty and gives you a clear picture of what studying the discipline in college looks like. |
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Sessions Offered
Session 3 &4:
July 11, 2027 - July 24, 2027
Course Fees
Format
Residential
Non-Credit
Related Courses
This class is meant to be immersive and students will experience:
- Describe what landscape architects do, including the range of project types and scales the discipline covers, from residential gardens to parks, streets, and entire regions.
- Identify key moments and figures in the history of landscape architecture and explain how they shaped the public spaces we use today.
- Observe and document a site through fieldwork, recording features such as landform, vegetation, water, and how people use the space.
- Communicate design ideas through hand sketching and illustration.
- Build physical models to study and represent a design in three dimensions.
- Create basic 3D computer models and use photo-editing software to illustrate a proposed design.
- Develop a design proposal for an outdoor space and present it clearly to an audience.
Related Careers:
- Landscape Architect
- Urban Planner
- Ecological Restoration Specialist
- 3D Modeler/Visualizer
Meet the Professor
Tom Sterling
Assistant Professor in Residence of Landscape Architecture
Tom Sterling is an Assistant Professor in Residence in Landscape Architecture at UConn, where he teaches design studios and courses on drawing, mapping, and construction. He is interested in how designers use tools, from hand sketches and physical models to computers and digital maps, to understand landscapes and imagine how they could change. He founded LandFAB, UConn Landscape Architecture’s fabrication lab, where students use laser cutters, 3D printers, and other equipment to turn their ideas into physical models and prototypes. His classes have taken students into the field to map how climate change affects neighborhoods in New Haven and to design outdoor classrooms built from low-carbon materials. Tom is also completing his Doctor of Design at Harvard University, where he studies the history of how computers came to shape the way designers think about the environment.
