Foster, Jeremy

member of graduate field

teaching overview

My main aim as a teacher is to nurture designers who see landscape architecture as form of creative practice – a sensibility that becomes more, not less, crucial as landscape architects are required to master an ever-widening array of basic competencies, and the temptation has become overwhelming to reduce “design” to quasi-scientific “problem solving” appended to utilitarian analysis. Creative, informed ideation has become woefully rare in the professions involved in regenerating extensive environments today. This despite the unique opportunities of landscape design, which stem from the medium’s propensity to constant transformation, and the multi-scalar, temporarily-unfolding web of interactions arising between sites and the larger “worlds” (physical and virtual) in which they are embedded. These multivalent interactions have become increasingly important in contemporary practice, when the most significant design projects often involve thinking across and between disciplinary scales, practices and vocabularies. For all these reasons, I see the topic of “representation” as central to landscape architectural education. In my view, a student’s ability to think and ‘see’ analytically, analogically and associatively is completely tied to their representational fluency, technique and range. This is about more than “graphics” or “communication”; students not only need to learn to draw (and model) illustratively -- that is, to record, depict, even “abstract”, that which they already know -- but also speculatively and critically, to find and model as-yet-undiscovered potentialities, effects, and relationships. Most landscapes require the orchestration of extensive, heterogeneous and contingent relations that are impossible to engage with until represented in some fashion. Learning how to work critically with, in and through representation is a core skill that transcends the design project or environmental philosophy. It also forces designers to confront the ambivalent agency of the “landscape idea”, which since its emergence in Western society has always mapped cultural values onto a shifting material terrain, and lent practical actions ideological and theoretical power – something that has become especially true in an era of digital representation. Both within individual studios and as an overarching principle of program articulation, this critical-theoretical use of representation promotes a mode of design that is about more than the reproduction of conventions, patterns or a “look”. It builds awareness of the eidetic potentials of representation, and how representation in itself can become a form of critical inquiry. It also inculcates a reflexive, self-guided openness to new possibilities, and mediates adaptive strategies for defining problems that transcend scale and context. This complex epistemology is most successfully inculcated through design studios in which a tightly-orchestrated chain of representational exercises are used to address a succession of increasingly complex design questions. The questions and subjects of these studios can vary dramatically, depending on whether they are at a foundation or advanced level, without altering the fundamental importance of this form of learning/knowing. The topic of representation is also implicit in my long-standing interest in the way human landscapes are shaped by cultural practices and discourses. These dimensions of landscape have attracted unparalleled interest in the humanities over the last 15 years, which have helped recast the ‘landscape medium’ as, at once, an assemblage of material and cultural practices, a geographical space of representation, and an ideologically charged medium of discourse. This expanded definition of landscape is central in my non-design teaching on landscape and urban design, in which I integrate my designer’s interest in representation and visual culture with my scholarly interests in history and critical theory. Over the last few years I have developed a series of topical seminars that explore how landscape interventions of all scales are invariably projections of a particular ideological and iconological milieu. All these seminars “historicize theory and theorize history”, expanding students awareness of the heterogeneous roots of landscape design, and unpacking the recurring problematics inherent in the production of extensive, mutable environments. Just as the field of landscape architecture has expanded, so landscape history needs to diversify the knowledges, archives and genealogies it draws on. Studying history is about much more countering shallow “historicism” and “presentism” in design discourse, and training students who, over multi-decade careers, will be capable of critically engaging with current trends. Recent trends in landscape theory suggest that there is an urgent need for histories that re-situate the familiar canon of designers, formal vocabularies and sites within an array of territorial-operational processes that have become obscured in building the profession over the last century. Reclaiming these ‘histories’ (which are often geographies too) through research, analysis, and representation unpacks the constantly-shifting relations between human and non-human agents in built environments, and models the synthesis between ecological and cultural sustainability urgently needed in practice today. It also helps to prepare students for alternative forms of practice, at a time when design offices are setting up autonomous research units whose focus is on interpretation, curation and programming, and whose “projects” are publications, exhibits or installations.

teaching activities

service to the profession

Royal Geographic Society Member 1999 -
Graduate Architecture & Landscape Architecture studio juries. University of Pennsylvania Research Review Panel 1987 - 1994
Graduate Summer Archaeological/Landscape Architecture studio Research Review Panel - 1991

education and training

Ph.D. in Cultural Geography, University of London 1998
M.L.A., University of Pennsylvania, Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning 1984
University of Pennsylvania 1984
B.Arch., University of Cape Town, School of Architecture 1981
University of Cape Town 1981

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VIVO: Cornell Research & Scholarship

Foster, Jeremy

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