Seeing, understanding and representing landscapes through sketching

So this is Seeing, Understanding and Representing Landscapes in the Built Environment. This course does a really great job of getting students to engage in our natural and built environments through those three verbs, Seeing, Understanding and Representing. It's really asking them to kind of look at the spaces we inhabit every day and kind of develop a critical lens to do so. Looking at theories, methodologies, past practice and then kind of situating that or practicing that through drawing itself. Today we have gathered here at the Graduate Life Center. We are doing a sketch walk and typically on these sketch walks we look for key aspects that form the landscape and we try to communicate that through drawings. You kind of learn that landscapes are more than just an environment. It's the people, communities, history, all of that that builds that. One of the main focuses in this class has been viewing landscape through different lenses and not just looking at a landscape but asking questions about it and I feel in the same way when you look at architecture you have to ask questions about why is this a building here or why was it built the way that it is and this class has definitely been helping me build those critical thinking and problem solving skills. Anyone can draw, like one of the big things I talk about in this course is we're not We're here to make pretty pictures, we're here to make design drawings and design drawings can be beautiful but they don't have to be. You don't necessarily have to put hyper realism into a drawing for the viewer to understand what it is, you just have to put information that's understandable and that's kind of changed how I've been drawing. Not all of our students are designers, they're not going to go off to do a design major but even for them to be able to read the spaces they inhabit and maybe you know have influence on later on whether they end up in governments or in policy or you know just in their own community spaces you have a better understanding about how you can shape the world around you.