Landscape Architecture Faculty Present Papers at Educators Conference

Photo Submitted

Landscape architecture professor Kimball Erdman discovered this abandoned railroad corridor while running in Prairie Grove.

All seven faculty members in the landscape architecture department of the Fay Jones School of Architecture recently had peer-reviewed abstracts accepted by the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture. Six of them presented those papers at the 2013 annual conference, held in March at the University of Texas at Austin.

Noah Billig, assistant professor, presented “Degrees of Life and Complexity in Istanbul Informal Settlements.” This study measures the degrees of life and complexity (as defined by Nikos Salingaros and Christopher Alexander) in two Istanbul informal settlements. It demonstrates the complex living structures that can result from generative forms of self-organization.

Billig and Kimball Erdman presented “Reading Place Through Reconnaissance Running.” This study examines running as a means to understand place and landscape. In particular, the “reconnaissance” run in unfamiliar places is used as a mode for strengthening cognitive maps that are cues for further study of place, including natural and cultural history.

Mark Boyer, professor and department head, was a co-presenter on a panel presentation titled “Open Forum for the Committee on Strategic Planning and Faculty Support.” This panel is collecting ideas and information from faculty for faculty development and support ideas that can be developed and implemented by the newly formed Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture's Committee on Faculty Support (of which Boyer is a member). This committee is concerned with the mentoring and development of all stages of faculty through the tenure and promotion process.

Judy Brittenum, associate professor, presented “Say It Isn’t So: Clarifying the Role of Plant Knowledge and Usage in Landscape Architecture.” Brittenum conducted a national survey of all accredited schools of landscape architecture to determine the current state of planting design and plant identification courses. More than two-thirds of the schools responded, and, due to this data, Brittenum was awarded an off-campus-duty-assignment to continue the study in-depth.

Kimball Erdman, assistant professor, presented “Rohwer Memorial Cemetery: A Story of Hope and a Desire for Permanence.” This presentation summarized the landscape history of a cemetery built by Japanese-American internees at the Rohwer Relocation Center near Rohwer, Ark., both during the period of internment (during World War II) and the transformation of the space in the years that followed.

Phoebe McCormick Lickwar, assistant professor, presented “The Analytical Eye: Awakening Design Students to the Potential of Photographic Inquiry.” This paper examines the ways in which photographic inquiry enables site discovery, addressing the gap in the literature on photography as an analytical tool for designers of the built environment, specifically the process of thinking through photography as opposed to thinking about the photograph. The paper presented the ways the medium has historically been used as a tool for research and an analysis of the observational and analytical skills gained by design students engaged in the fall 2012 Siteworks course.

Lickwar also presented “Falling Barns: Registers of Social and Economic Evolution in the Arkansas Ozarks,” co-authored with Frank Jacobus, assistant professor of architecture. The wind-blown, weather-etched falling barn is frozen time in the landscape of the Arkansas Ozarks. Over the next 20 to 30 years, Americans will watch as most of the falling barns that populate their landscape fall further into disrepair or are removed from the landscape entirely. This paper offers an exploration of the social and political particularities that reveal themselves through the marriage of landscape and built form, and creates a formal record of the falling barns in the Ozark region of Arkansas before they disappear forever.

Carl Smith, assistant professor, and Lickwar presented “Igniting Creativity in the Design Studio: Ideas for Action.” Smith and Lickwar co-authored this with Katya Crawford of the University of New Mexico and Blake Belanger of the Kansas State University. The paper explored the many approaches to fostering creativity in the design studio. The traditional studio structure typically involves precedent studies, site analysis, progress pin-ups, final reviews and grading rubrics. Their research questions the effectiveness of these inherited methods as the best way to ignite confidence and creativity in students. As studio is at the core of an education in landscape architecture, it is essential to continually evaluate the effectiveness and appropriateness of these methods. In their research, the panel takes on the typical studio as a design problem. They identify what they perceive to be the salient issues embedded in tradition and search for alternative methods for igniting the creative process.

John Crone, professor, wrote a paper titled “A Comparison of Roosevelt New Deal West and Midwest Farm Communities.”