University of pennsylvania school of design
LARP 761: Urban Ecology
Stephanie Carlisle + Nicholas Pevzner, 2011-present
The Urban Ecology class is the 2nd-year LARP students’ introduction to the core concepts, ecological mechanisms, and vocabulary of contemporary urban ecology. The class aims to introduce and expose students to various methods of studying urban systems, to build students’ facility and comfort with accessing and reading scientific literature, to ground students in some of the fundamental ecological mechanisms that underlie and control ecosystem function in urban environments, and introduce them to contemporary modes of environmental management strategies that aim to steer ecological function towards desired outcomes.
The class covers topics from contemporary ecological theory to applied strategies and techniques. It starts with basic landscape ecology (patterns and the processes that shape those patterns), moves to vegetation community dynamics (stress, disturbance, competition, succession), then the fundamentals of ecosystem ecology, (basic biogeochemical cycling, the Nitrogen Cycle, the Carbon Cycle, and the role of various landscapes, land uses, activities, and strategies in mediating and altering these interlinked biogeochemical processes). Lastly, it integrates some more applied topics, bringing in guest speakers from a variety of disciplines, from applied restoration ecology, long-term ecological research in cities, urban forestry & urban forest research, and remediation.
ARCH 732-007: Embodied Carbon and Architecture
Stephanie Carlisle, Spring 2020
The environmental impacts of the built environment are staggering. Buildings are currently responsible for 40% of global carbon emissions, when both operational and embodied carbon are taken into account. Architects have a vital role to play in responding to the current climate emergency, but we can only make substantial progress when we are equipped to evaluate decarbonization strategies and the affects of design decisions.
This course brings together an introduction to Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), the industry-standard method for evaluating the environmental impacts of a building over its whole life cycle, paired with discussion on broader industry trends and technologies aimed at radically decarbonizing the built environment. In the course, students will receive hands-on experience building comparative LCA models, while also exploring material life cycles, industrial processes, supply chain dynamics and political and economic dimensions of environmental impact data. We will also discuss current innovations in materials manufacturing and policy changes that focus on embodied carbon, which will transform construction practices. The overall goal of the course is to increase carbon literacy and to empower students with a working understanding of climate change, life cycle assessment, and the many strategies by which designers can immediately reduce the carbon footprint of their projects. This course does not require any previous modeling or software experience.
LARP 702: Territories of Extraction
Nicholas Pevzner, Spring 2014
This elective studio investigated the territorial agency of energy landscapes, by looking at spatial patterns of resource extraction on public lands, and tracing resource flows through the networks of energy production, transmission, storage, and consumption.
The studio had three fundamental components: TECHNOLOGY, TERRITORY, and FUTURES. The TECHNOLOGY segment developed a deeper understanding of the metrics of a variety of energy systems, both fossil-fueled and renewable. TERRITORY analyzed the potential spatial realignments that energy corridors and nodes of development could effect on specific landscapes at a large scale, looking for agency, synergies, and opportunistic alignments. FUTURES speculated on a variety of possible outcomes, shaped by alternative policy decisions. By comparing how different technologies of extraction affect their sites’ environmental resources and socioeconomic layers, students could better understand the tradeoffs made in producing energy, as well as new potentials that might yield novel possibilities for settlement.
Finally, the studio considered both the historic typologies of extraction and their effect on the land, as well as future landscapes of extraction as they can be expected to shift with changes in policy, climate, water, and populations in the decades ahead. While the design and deployment of energy systems operates at the megaregional scale, the act of extraction alters the landscape at both local and regional scales. Our investigation of the effects of these large systems on specific territories looked to ground the abstract system with specific, detailed design interventions, asking what meanings landscapes of extraction carry, and for whom.
LARP 602: Urban Design Core Studio
Nicholas Pevzner, Spring 2015, 2016, 2017
This studio represents an introduction to the core competencies of contemporary urban design, focused around a public realm landscape framework. It familiarizes students with the building blocks of urban form — from basic building and block typologies, to typologies of open spaces, to the interrelationship between built form and public realm — as well as with the multiple processes, forms, and drivers of contemporary urbanism.
LARP 601: Green Stimuli: Rethinking the Role of Industry
Nicholas Pevzner, Fall 2014
This core regional planning-scale landscape studio asked students to reconsider the components of a working industrial landscape, in the context of the Regional Plan Association’s Fourth Regional Plan for the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut metropolitan area. It explored ecological strategies for building more resilient industrial districts in a rapidly changing economic landscape.
LARP 601: Metropolitan Catalytic Lines
Nicholas Pevzner, Fall 2012, 2013
This urban design studio explored a sweep of North Philadelphia grappling with a high proportion of vacancy and a history of disinvestment. The studio proposed a sequence of catalytic projects that could partner with local institutional actors to jump-start investment in these districts, while accommodating the needs of current residents.
LARP 501: Landscape Process: Imagination and Craft
Nicholas Pevzner, Fall 2015, 2016
This is the first studio of the graduate landscape studio sequence. It immerses students in direct observation and measurement of dense, culturally and ecologically layered sites. Projects explore these places through the insertion of a carefully considered footpath, which leads visitors between a series of finely tuned landscape moments that reflect on ideas of nature, culture, ecology, and time.
Wright Ingram INstitute
Field Stations: New Futures for Rural Landscapes
Wright Ingram Institute & Fundación Amazonas | Medellín and Rio Claro, Colombia
Stephanie Carlisle + Nicholas Pevzner, Summer 2019
Field Stations is an immersive educational workshop at ecologically-critical places facing rapid change. The program is based in Bogotá, Medellín, and in the tropical rain forest of the Rio Claro Valley in Colombia. This project draws from the fields of environmental planning, design, ecology, forest management, cultural landscape studies, and environmental communication.
The workshop aimed, through intense on-site immersion, to expose participants to an understanding and deepened appreciation of the complex inter-relatedness of natural and cultural phenomena as exhibited by a particular landscape and ecosystem. Field-based, cross-cultural, place-based learning pulls the study of sustainability out of a purely academic context and engages in living the experience of communities and the unique issues and conditions of surrounding ecosystems, bio-regions and watersheds. The program encouraged understanding of the natural world through experimentation, data collection, drawing, photography, digital visualization, reviewing of historical records and exchanges with the community.
The month-long, field-based program brought together a diverse group of participants form design, planning, anthropology, sociology, media, environmental science and engineering. The curriculum used a socio-ecological framework to examine layered histories of urban and rural landscapes of Antioquia. The program was funded by the Wright Ingram Foundation and benefited greatly from the generous support of the Fundación Amazonas and an incredible community of Colombian researchers, scholars and artists.
Harvard University, Graduate School of Design (GSD)
STU 1212 MLA Core Studio IV (Thule Air Base, Greenland)
Nicholas Pevzner, Spring 2016
This studio is the part of the core landscape sequence focused on territory and territorialization. Each studio section focused in on a different U.S. military installation and its relationship to landscape and territory; the Thule Air Base section explored the arctic ecology and indigenous practices that occupy the territory claimed by the airbase today, as well as its potential re-territorialization in the near future as a locus of scientific glacial research, increased arctic maritime activity, and indigenous cultural resistance amid a changing North.