Landscape Architecture Commons^™

From Pasture To Pavement: Urban Expansion And Its Environmental Consequences In Perth, Anastasia Charelishvili

Student Theses 2015-Present

This thesis addresses the pressing issue of ecological problems of urban sprawl and its intricate impacts on urban health, with a particular focus on vulnerable communities in Perth, Australia. Chapter 1 presents the city's historical background and emphasizes the depletion of ecosystem services, underscoring the need for environmental justice. It also introduces the causes and effects of the sprawl in Perth and draws upon a diverse range of environmental problems created by suburbia, such as air pollution, biodiversity loss, water pollution, and runoff. As these threats translate into urban health declines, such as respiratory problems and increased healthcare issues, Chapter …

Nature As Material, Time As Tool, Chuchu Chen

Masters Theses

No building stands forever. Over time, the natural environment acts upon the outer surface of the building, leading to the failure of materials and the final dissolution of the structure itself, leading to ruin. In order to prevent this or retard its occurrence, we constantly maintain and renew the things we build. Nature seems to stand in opposition to architecture. The passage of time is constantly subtracting from the building. However, what differentiates nature from architecture? This thesis questions whether these two are not opposed, but on a continuous spectrum. Approaching the building as part of the overall environment that …

City As Cemetery, Siqiao Zhao

Masters Theses

The traditional funeral service industry has enormous environmental and financial costs. In contrast, green burial, and Natural Organic Reduction (NOR), accelerate the human body’s degradation and reduce toxic substances in the land, assuming responsibility for our burden on the earth. They provide a gateway between us and the processes of nature and ask us to set aside self-consciousness to accept our oneness with the universe. By gifting our bodies back to the earth, where decomposition enriches soils and nurtures the growth of other life forms, we honor those who have transitioned to another state by continuing the cycle of renewal. …

Unearthing Complexity: Tangible Histories Of Water And Earth, Alexis Violet

Masters Theses

Unearthing Complexity investigates conceptions of time and surface through geological stories of the water and earth. Building on theories of deep time, hydrofeminism, critical zones, and grounding, I hope to foster a deeper awareness of time scales other than our own and a more tangible understanding of the embodied experience of matter in the universe. Working toward a new literacy of the water and earth in which they are recognized as living, changing bodies to which we are inherently tied at a molecular level, the site of this multiscalar inquiry occurs in the coastal zones of the Narragansett Bay where …

On The Edge Of The "Er-Ocean" State, Mariesa Travers

Masters Theses

This thesis will explore how hard coastal infrastructure methods can be redesigned by softening the coastal edge to support the ecosystem and enhance public access to the beach. By referencing and arguing against techniques used by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) as a solution to deal with coastal erosion, this process will propose a regenerated design system. Through a series of material experiments, this research works with natural processes and flows, to create transitory systems that erode and ebb with the coast.

The End Of Everything: The Physical And Figurative Impacts Of Landscape On American Ideology, Wyatt Alger

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

Quantifying The Carbon Stored And Sequestered By The Trees On Pomona College’S Campus, Paola A. Giron-Carson

Scripps Senior Theses

We are experiencing a climate crisis that must be confronted with strategic mitigation. Pomona College contributes to the climate crisis through its emissions for which there is a baseline record. However there is no baseline record of the climate mitigation currently performed by the trees on Pomona’s campus through carbon storage. This study seeks to determine a current baseline quantity of carbon stored and sequestrated by Pomona’s trees as well as possible courses of climate mitigation for Pomona College to take. Initial information gathering was conducted through interviews with several stakeholders. This study was conducted using data collected prior to …

The Evergreen Challenges Of Healing: An Evaluation Of Urban Green Space In Harambee, Kacee Ochalek

Theses and Dissertations

Urban green space initiatives have emerged in low- and middle-income cities as a solution to disinvestment, the production of more positive public health metrics, and a tool of community engagement. While the production of urban greening provides ample room for applause, The City of Milwaukee’s Healing Spaces Initiative model regarding the ongoing construction of green space and the implementation of maintenance creates challenges that perpetuate racist capitalistic notions of the neoliberal project. This paper presents reports from participant observation, document analysis, and 17 qualitative interviews with representatives of the City of Milwaukee, community partners, garden leaders, and residents. The data …

Some (Im)Material Girls, Living In (Im)Material Worlds, With Seeds, Stars, And Shit, Matthew Weiderspon

Theses and Dissertations

This writing situates material and gestural vocabularies cultivated in my artwork in relation to my lived experience; primarily my rural upbringing in Colorado. Scattered floor dispersals, calling sounds, and bodily movements desire reconsiderations of hope in precarity through a disorientation of place, association, scale, and language.

Conserving Water Through Modular Planting Design: Water-Wise Templates For Ogden's Residential Front Yard Landscapes, Jessica Clements

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Due to the arid climate of the Wasatch front and the projected population growth in the next thirty years, water conservation is essential. Consequently, because the landscape consumes 60% of Utah residences’ purified drinking water, water-wise landscaping needs to be a priority. This thesis creates water-wise landscape templates that can be applied to the front yards of Ogden rental properties using a modular planting method. This study determines best practices by researching topics such as water-wise plants for Northern Utah, templates utilized in other areas, modular planting, and existing organizations with similar goals. This results in a user-friendly guide that …

Usu Equine-Assisted Activities And Therapies Facilities Designed Master Plan, Lindsie C. Smith

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Equine-Assisted Activities and Therapies (EAAT) is recognized as a therapeutic approach for persons with disabilities. The USU Animal, Dairy, and Veterinary Sciences Department provides EAAT instruction and services; however, they do not have the appropriate facilities to model best-practices in the delivery of these services. This design research entailed the development of a phased masterplan to support the instruction and delivery of equine-assisted activities and therapies in an innovative and accessible environment that supports animal-assisted intervention and natural equine behaviors.

The methodology used to approach the master plan design was derived from Norman K. Booth’s (1990) design process, as described …

Photosynthesizing The Workplace: A Study In Healthy And Holistic Production Spaces, Kaeli Howard

Masters Theses

Throughout time nature has been a prescribed healer of stress on the human condition. Its vital integration into our daily lives has been proven by scientific evidence. The majority of Americans spend approximately 1/3 of their life working, whatever that job may entail. Therefore, it makes sense that the environments that we spend so much of our life in for work at extremely important to our physical and mental health, however, current workplace models are not acknowledging that. Redefining the workplace to integrate nature would start to change work life in this country and how work itself is viewed.

This …

Vincent Van Gogh's Wheatfields And Piet Oudolf's Meadows: Color, Contrast And Change In The Landscape, Erin A. Cox

Landscape Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

This capstone investigates the unique relationship between Vincent Van Gogh and planting designer Piet Oudolf's vibrant use of color and contrast in their work as it relates to their perception of the landscape. The project is mainly a comparison of the two artists, exploring Van Gogh's use of complementary colors and brushstroke techniques to create vivid contrast in his renderings of agrarian landscapes, and Oudolf's parallel approach to creating painterly meadows and prairie gardens. The project focuses on Van Gogh’s study of wheat field landscapes, which are essentially the same in structure and composition but can be used to compare …

Building A Better Batture: A Regional Recreational Enhancement Around The Morganza To The Gulf Levee, Taylor N. Fehmel

LSU Master's Theses

Twenty-five years ago, the existing flood protection levees along the Louisiana coastline were removed and construction was started by Terrebonne Levee and Conservation District on a new project called ‘Morganza to the Gulf’ or MTG. This project was undertaken to construct a new flood protection levee system around Louisiana in the communities in Terrebonne and Lafourche Parish. The MTG Levee is one of the first coastal projects in Louisiana to incorporate a risk-based analysis for a double levee system containing both local parish drainage levees and future storm surge levees of MTG. It was designed to protect approximately 250,000 people …

From Maintenance To Stewardship: Green Stormwater Infrastructure Capacity In Vermont Towns & Design And Participatory Processes To Provide Cultural Ecosystem Services, Holly Lee Greenleaf

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

The impervious surfaces of built landscapes create stormwater runoff that causes water quantity and quality problems downstream, upsetting natural hydrology and harming aquatic ecosystems. Green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) includes practices that reduce the amount of stormwater runoff and the pollutants it carries utilizing plants, soils, and other materials to capture, store, reuse, infiltrate, evapotranspire, and filter stormwater. GSI helps to restore developed landscapes, mimicking natural hydrologic processes and providing important water treatment functions as well as beneficial green spaces in urban areas. However, there are many challenges associated with the implementation and maintenance of GSI in our communities and cultures. …

Radical Social Ecology As Deep Pragmatism: A Call To The Abolition Of Systemic Dissonance And The Minimization Of Entropic Chaos, Arielle Brender

Student Theses 2015-Present

This paper aims to shed light on the dissonance caused by the superimposition of Dominant Human Systems on Natural Systems. I highlight the synthetic nature of Dominant Human Systems as egoic and linguistic phenomenon manufactured by a mere portion of the human population, which renders them inherently oppressive unto peoples and landscapes whose wisdom were barred from the design process. In pursuing a radical pragmatic approach to mending the simultaneous oppression and destruction of the human being and the earth, I highlight the necessity of minimizing entropic chaos caused by excess energy expenditure, an essential feature of systems that aim …

A Simulated Walk In Nature: Testing Predictions From The Attention Restoration Theory, Corey Crossan

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Attention Restoration Theory (ART) predicts that top-down processing during everyday activities can cause attentional fatigue and that bottom-up processing that occurs when people experience nature will be restorative (Kaplan, 1995). The present study examined this prediction by exposing participants to three different conditions using a repeated measures design: a control condition during which participants walked on a typical treadmill, a nature/restorative condition during which participants walked on the same treadmill, experiencing a simulated nature walk, and a perturbation condition that included the same simulated nature scene but also required top-down processing during the walk. The findings supported ART predictions. As …

How Do Designers Of The Built Environment Attempt To Make Ecological Sustainability Sensory Legible?, Carly L. Bartow

Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

This paper attempts to provide a theoretical framework for making ecosystem function and ecologically sustainable design more perceptible or sensible to people through architecture and the built environment. Design features of the Bertschi School Science Wing and the Bullitt Center in Seattle, Washington are incorporated to illustrate the sensory legibility of ecological sustainability criteria.The criteria are available to designers to help educate a building's occupants on environmentally sustainable design and motivate more sustainable behavior.

Speed And Resolution In The Age Of Technological Reproducibility, Shawn Taylor

Theses and Dissertations

The rate of acceleration of the biologic and synthetic world has for a while now, been in the process of exponentially speeding up, maxing out servers and landfills, merging with each other, destroying each other. The last prehistoric relics on Earth are absorbing the same oxygen, carbon dioxide and electronic waves in our biosphere as us. A degraded .jpeg enlarged to full screen on a Samsung 4K UHD HU8550 Series Smart TV - 85” Class (84.5” diag.). Within this composite ecology, the ancient limestone of the grand canyon competes with the iMax movie of itself, the production of Mac pros, …

The History Of Trial Gardens, Hallie Schmidt

Horticulture and Crop Science

Essay explores the history of home gardening and seed industry in America and the conditions that led to the development of the All-America Selections.

Urban Agriculture Stormwater Management In California Cities, Rachel L. Cohen

Master's Theses

Cities within California are beginning to incorporate urban agriculture into their land use designations. Prompted by residents and local organizations, cities are hoping to capture the benefits that urban agriculture provides. Research has shown that urban agriculture renews and beautifies neighborhoods, provides healthy food choices, increases public health, has the potential to help with stormwater runoff, creates jobs, and fosters community. In the last few years, several California cities have made headlines as they have adopted new zoning codes that include urban agriculture.

In reviewing these new zoning codes and exploring the topic of urban agriculture, it became evident that …

Evidence Of Agrarian Urbanism: Land Use Preferences Of Residents Living On Small Acreage Farms Or Large Lots With Animal Rights In Cache Valley, Utah, Laurie B. Hurst

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Until the last half century, land development patterns in the Intermountain West were designed after the Mormon settlement pattern. With its gridiron streets and in-town farmsteads, this pattern gave families the opportunity to grow crops and raise a few animals on their one acre or less in town, with the added advantage of having a social life. In many places over the last century, cities have grown, small farms have dwindled, and large farms have been pushed to the fringe. However, in the Intermountain West the agrarian tradition continues with a number of families who grow gardens and raise animals …