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RISD Landscape, Providence, RI (2026)

09/09/2025

In conjunction with the annual ASLA Conference in New Orleans, the RISD Department of Landscape Architecture is delighted to host a reception honoring our remarkable alumni. Special guests include Associate Professor Johanna Barthmaier-Payne and the co-presidents of the RISD ASLA Student Chapter, Manal Imran Dar and Maria Lopez Vazquez.

Lite fare and drinks will be served. Please RSVP by emailing [email protected]

When: Saturday, October 11th, 5:30-9:30
Where: The Will & The Way (Back Patio) 719 Toulouse St, New Orleans, LA 70130

05/06/2025

Finally, I ( ) would like to highlight some work from courses I’ve taught within our core curriculum. With a background in both architecture and landscape, I’m especially interested in how abstract, conceptual design processes intersect with landscape materials and space. I am also interested in how we can reconceive how 20th century infrastructures can be reimagined to support the social and ecological fabric of cities.

Images 1–11: These images are from this year’s Design Principles course, which I co-taught with John O’Keefe (.design ). For over a decade, this studio has been set at RISD’s beloved Tillinghast Farm—a coastal landscape that serves as a site for experimentation, research, stewardship, and the occasional sunbathing session by the RISD community. As the first studio in our core sequence, students spend significant time on-site, beginning with studies of topography, vegetation, and ground conditions, and culminating in the design and installation of temporary gathering spaces made from found and limited construction materials. The work here includes contributions by Mallory McPherson, Manal Imran Dar, Katie Lesh, Lily Berman, Gabrielle Gehler, Zihan Sun, Runqing Chen, Somer Ellis, Lauren Russo, Melina Charalabopoulos, and Zheng Zhu. (Also featured: Colgate Searle digging holes and teaching us about soil.)

Images 12–20: These slides are from the Disruptive Infrastructures studio, which explores the effects of 20th-century highway construction on contemporary cities. This iteration focused on Routes 6 and 10 in Providence, which pass through the Woonasquatucket River Valley, dividing the city’s neighborhoods and sub. Featured work includes projects by Ruoyen Chen, Zitong Hui, Weirong Luo, and Jais Taylor.

05/02/2025

Hey there, here again! In this post, I’d like to share a few elective courses I’ve taught. These classes often emerge from the experiments and questions I explore in my research, especially around visualizing the invisible and nuanced aspects of dynamic environments.

Slides 1-7: These images are from a course I recently taught called Embodied Environments. This course introduces students to sensors and microcontrollers, guiding them as they develop tools for sensing and visualizing atmospheric space in real time. Student work featured here includes projects by Sean Hong, Jingjing Huang, and Ruijie Tai. (Department Head is also shown demonstrating one of the tools!)

Slides 8–18: These slides feature work from my current seminar, Drawing States of Change. In the first half of the course, students learn workflows for observing, drawing, and animating change in dynamic materials, setting the stage for exploring dynamic environments. Featured here are projects by Sathya Munagamage, Dahlia Aggarwal, Chloe Kahn, Claudia Peck, and Camilla Radoyce.

05/02/2025

Hi! I’m Suzanne Mathew an Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at RISD. This week, I’m honored to spotlight some of the work from my research and teaching.

My research focuses on developing techniques to observe, measure, and visualize sensory phenomena in the environment to better understand their dimensional, dynamic, and material qualities.

Slides 1–5: These images showcase a range of visualization experiments I conducted in grove spaces at the Landscape Labs at the Swedish Landscape University in Alnarp. I use hand drawing, photography, and digital modeling to depict the atmospheric and light qualities created by various plant species.

Slides 6–7: I am continually exploring new survey techniques. These images represent a first attempt at using photogrammetry to create ‘forest floor plans’ that capture the patterns of light projected onto the ground.

Slides 8–13: I’ve been working with the Pantheon in Rome since 2008. These images include a range of techniques—time-lapse video, parametric modeling, and fabrication—to depict projected shade as volumetric and materially connected to the built environment.

Slides 14–16: Much of my work stems from fieldwork. I use a range of photographic tools and weather instruments to capture changing microclimatic conditions on the ground.

03/04/2025

Finally, I want to tell you a little bit about what I’m teaching this semester. Besides from teaching studio (which you can see in the previous post), I also teach history and theory of landscape architecture at different levels in the MLA program. This includes the exploration of links between history, theory and practice, the experimentation with critical thinking, and the nurturing of writing as an iterative craft on both academic and creative levels.

Slide 1: My approach to critical thinking and making, where the trilogy Teaching/Practice/Research contextualizes the ethical and aesthetic approaches to and values of land that I care to pass on to new generations of students.
Slides 2–6: For the first time this spring I’m teaching History+Theory 3, a seminar where I invite students to think about ground. The course aims to activate several ways of thinking both through and with ground to make sense of it across scale. To ground ourselves critically and creatively (what Donna Haraway has called “grounding”), we study how different disciplines have understood and conceptualized ground and what it means (or could mean) for spatial and material practices. Student work by Molly Gordon and Jia-Ling Loo.

Slides 7–11: For more than a decade I’ve been teaching undergrad and grad seminars that seek new articulations in the complex relations between architectural, landscape and urban histories and theories, and their meaning and relevance to design. History+Theory 1 explores this through the lens of the natureculture entanglement and takes students on a journey to define landscape, learn about the importance of land ethics and an expanded set of territorial practices, systems and technologies across cultures and socio-political and environmental contexts. Student work by Danfei Zhang, Leigh Miller, Yu Chen and Yumeng Yan.

03/04/2025

Hello, again. Following from my previous post, as an educator and full-time faculty instructor for over a decade now (longer that I care to admit…), I deeply identify with RISD’s pedagogic approaches of learning through making and crafting. Design iteration and experimentation resonate with my scholarship and professional approaches in practice.

Slides 1–6: I recently taught in a year-long curriculum as part of RISD’s Sustainability Design Lab, a joint-initiative between the departments of Landscape Architecture and Interior Architecture and led by Johanna Barthmaier-Payne . The group of students focused on the study of clay and the conditions it exists in New England, across scale – from a territory or landscape, to architecture, and to the construction of clay-related prototypes. The Lab gestures towards the completion of a graduate thesis through which these students demonstrate invigorating experimentations that challenge conventional discourse around sustainability and propose alternative methods to practice and build. Student work by Ashley Pedersen, Jen Ansley, Olivia Newroz and Renata Berta).

Slides 7–12: Last fall, students in their final year embarked on an adventure with me across the ocean. The advanced landscape studio centered on the study of Lisbon’s water management, by examining the city’s topography and hydrology. The students were asked to read and unlock Lisbon’s water potentials while enhancing the value of landscape architecture in dealing with climate change, drought and flooding. Together with Suzanne Mathew the studio included a one-week trip to the city, where we walked (too much!) and met with several designers and decision makers from the city. Student work by Chloe Kahn, Serena Kwon and Zheyun Chen.

02/28/2025

Hi! My name is Tiago Torres-Campos , and I’m a Portuguese landscape architect and associate professor here at RISD. This week I’ll be showcasing some of my main activities as a designer, researcher and faculty instructor.

As a practitioner and researcher, I develop work at the intersection of the Anthropocene theory and the debates it has sparked over the last two decades and design practices of critical thinking and making that engage with noticing, making sense and bearing witness to the world.

Slides 1–3: Part of my research investigates the meanings of designing and practicing in the Anthropocene. In 2022, I co-edited “Postcards from the Anthropocene” together with Benek Cincik . The book explores how our discursive and material conditions around the Anthropocene might transform the way we think about representation. It includes forty-five contributions that cut across the Anthropocene debate and add new perspectives.

Slides 4–7: /Rupture/Regeneration is a recent research initiative that investigates issues related to desertification along the Mediterranean basin and with a focus on Portugal’s southern territories. Together with Filipe Shibuya , we explore innovative methods to address desertification by developing bio-based materials that incorporate cork and other elements from the montado (cork oak farms). These images were taken in the summer of 2024, when Felipe and I did an art & design residency, which included extensive fieldwork and data collection towards biomaterial exploration with different cork-based recipes of bioplastic.

Slides 8–15: I am currently working on a new book titled “New York Geologics: Representation of Manhattan from the Anthropocene,” where I showcase several reciprocities between Manhattan and the geologic conditions in which it forcefully exists. The book results from a critical reflection on my (rather long!) PhD, which focused on experimental representation of Manhattan as a territorial laboratory to explore how ideas of ground, scale, or frame may affect and disrupt readings of temporal and material contexts in the city.

01/23/2025

Applications open on February 1, 2025 for “Material Revolution: Biological, Geological, and Circular Assemblies,” a RISD Global Summer Studies course exploring the use and reuse of biologic, geologic and city-sourced materials at the bioregional scale. Students will spend three weeks in Brussels, Belgium, working with BC Architects & Studies (https://bc-as.org) and RISD faculty Fatema Maswood (LDAR) and Leeland McPhail (ARCH) to explore design practices rooted in a transformative ethic of material sourcing, application, and infrastructure in design practice and pedagogy. Students enrolled in the course will work with BC Studies to prototype 1:1 earthen, plant-based, and repurposed material assemblies as part of the office’s research for Stadsatelierdeville, a Circular Materials and Economy Hub located in Brussels . The group will meet fabricators and designers, visit materials sourcing sites in the region, explore built precedents, and learn prototyping techniques. If you are interested and/or have any questions, please join one of our upcoming info sessions at the RISD Global office and on Zoom!

Info Sessions:
January 24, 12:15-12:45PM, RISD Global Office + Zoom
January 29, 12:15-12:45PM, RISD Global Office + Zoom
January 30, 7-7:30PM, Zoom

Links + further info: linktr.ee/bioregionalmaterials

Image credits: (1-6) BC Architects & Studies (7) Linktree QR Code

09/30/2024

This week we are featuring student internships! We invited students to share their experiences and what they learned over the summer.

Sean Tang () is a third year in the MLA program who interned at Perkins Eastman () in New York City.

"During the summer, I assisted the landscape team with detailed construction drawings and renderings. Sometimes, I visited construction sites with the architecture department. The most interesting part was seeing the design through their perspective each time I joined them, and we often shared jokes and experiences, which built a sense of camaraderie."

09/30/2024

This week we are featuring student internships! We invited students to share their experiences and what they learned over the summer.

Allie Abrams ‘25 is a third year in the MLA program who interned at Castle Bay Design Studio in St. Augustine, FL.

“During my time interning at Castle Bay Design Studio, I assisted in construction documentation, conceptual renderings for public parks and planned neighborhood developments, residential backyard construction / irrigation / lighting plans, and historic streetscape revitalization surveys in St. Augustine, FL. Additionally, I attended three public input meetings as a representative of the firm in regard to their ongoing commitment to the City of Daytona Beach’s Parks and Recreation Master Plan.”

RISD Landscape

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