The Fuller Initiative for Productive Landscapes (FIPL) is an internationally recognized initiative for research-based design and design as research, focused on the role of place in cultural sustainability, and grounded in the arts and humanities. Guided by a team of scholars, students use fieldwork and art methods to investigate the ongoing stewardship of landscapes and culture. The Fuller Initiative for Productive Landscapes has four primary goals:
- Reclaim second nature – the productive landscape – as a central inquiry within the discipline of landscape architecture.
- Centralize praxis and material experimentation within the landscape curriculum.
- Connect University of Oregon students to globally significant places, practices, research, and pedagogies.
- Enhance the arts and humanities as modes of inquiry within the curriculum.
The FIPL holds a series of events over the academic year, in both Oregon and Pennsylvania, connecting students to critical ideas in landscape architecture through art inquiry, fieldwork, collaboration, and learning from experts in the field. The events are structured by an annual theme within the framework of productive landscapes. The FIPL runs three annual signature events: a summer field school that is an immersive, intense experience for a small group of students, initiated by a lecture open to the public, and a preparatory spring seminar open to any University student. The annual events alternate between different physical settings, learning modes, class size, and inquiry media to provide a wide range of opportunities for learning. The FIPL leverages the signature events as the basis of landscape architectural research, forging connections between collaborators, and resulting in the dissemination of arts- and humanities-based landscape architecture research through publications, design competitions, and exhibitions.
Overlook Field School
University of Oregon students from the College of Design engage in interdisciplinary practicums, seminar, and invited lectures to advance research and scholarship on productive landscapes. The Field School bridges Pacific Northwestern and Northeastern landscapes in rural Pennsylvania through a unique initiative only offered through UO Landscape Architecture thanks to financial support from Sue and Mort Fuller. An initial practicum held at UO introduces students to the topic through an intense two-week project-based engagement preparing them for a year of focused seminars and lectures before a second practicum at Overlook. The second practicum offers students the opportunity to live and learn for two weeks at Overlook, a 400-acre property in northeastern Pennsylvania designed by the Olmsted Brothers firm in the early twentieth century, and currently being re-imagined by the fourth-generation owners and Nelson Byrd Woltz landscape architects. The summer field school at Overlook offers students a unique opportunity to live, study, and create on an evolving cultural landscape.
With faculty and a visiting artist in residence, students examine the enduring connections between landscape, culture, and production. The fully-funded program includes multi-day site visits to New York and Philadelphia. Daily activities include design charettes, fieldwork, seminars, expert speakers, and site visits to regional cultural and productive sites.
The application deadline for priority consideration is February 3, 2025. Please contact bshirtcl@uoregon.edu for more information if you have interest in the program past this deadline.
Learn more about the Overlook Farm HERE
See photos from the Overlook Field School HERE
2024 Topic: Vernacular Agriculture: What’s your sign?
The Fieldscape Fellowship at Overlook Farm is a field school program within the Landscape Architecture Program at the University of Oregon. The design-build practicum centers on creative collaboration at the Fuller Farm outside of Scranton, PA. Students are tasked with the design and fabrication of a temporary site-specific landscape installation over the course of two intensive workshops. The first workshop took place in summer 2024 with the conceptual development and proof of concept of a landscape installation. The second studio will take place in the summer of 2025 with the design-build of the final site-responsive work.
The Fieldscape Fellowship project explores the folk graphics, including the barn hex and quilt blocks, as well as historic timber frame barns of Pennsylvania in as an architectural form for communicating environmental narratives relative to agriculture, past, present, and future. The intention behind the Fieldscape Fellowship is to foster environmental education and landscape stewardship through creativity and community engagement by means of a professional-quality landscape-based project.
2024 Field School Studio: Riverside Urban Farm
The studio is supported by the Fuller Initiate for Productive Landscape to develop the Urban Farm Visioning Project articulated by the UO College of Design in 2022. This Visioning Project calls for “an outline of the vision, strategies, and required resources to expand UO’s urban farming educational and community impact while showcasing a uniquely Oregon-style exemplar of worldclass research in an ecologically responsive and productive landscape.”
This course is an initiative led by the Department of Landscape Architecture to involve students in the design and development of the Urban Farm expansion. The video captures the essence of the student work and motivational impact of the efforts of the students and studio instructors Ignacio López Busón, PLA (OR), ASLA, Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture and Mary Pilates Assistant Professor of Architecture.
See past years topics: HERE
Fuller Lectures
The Fuller Initiative supports an annual featured lecture at the University of Oregon in Eugene. The lecture expands upon the annual theme and provides a public forum for the community on the topic.
2025: Forbes Lipschitz
May 2, 5:30pm Giustina Ballroom, Ford Alumni Center
Feral Farms: Midwestern Recipes for Land Justice
In the face of biodiversity collapse and climate change, the American Midwest’s agricultural landscapes—marked by monocropping, concentrated animal feeding operations, and ecological degradation—hold untapped potential for transformation. This project explores the intersection of dietary change, ecological rewilding and land justice as mechanisms for reimagining the region’s agricultural and ecological futures. “Feral Farms” charts this pathway through a cartographic cookbook that reimagines the act of eating as a cultural, ecological, and political intervention. Drawing from the stories and practices of Indigenous farmers, foragers, and hunters, the project weaves together case studies that demonstrate how rewilding agriculture is already happening. These stories are coupled with actionable recipes that empower individuals to embrace dietary choices that foster biodiversity, sequester carbon, and support Indigenous-led stewardship of the land.
Forbes Lipschitz is an Associate Professor and the Graduate Chair of Landscape Architecture at the Knowlton School. As a faculty affiliate for the Initiative in Food and AgriCultural Transformation, her current research investigates the potential of design to reframe and reshape conventional working landscapes. Through public installations and participatory workshops, she explores ways for design to help communities better understand and engage with agricultural systems. Her research has been published nationally and internationally and her creative work has been featured in Landscape Architecture Magazine, Metropolis Magazine, and Smithsonian Magazine. She has been awarded funding from the Foundation for Food and Agricultural Research, the Graham Foundation for Fine Arts and the Van Alen Institute.
Link to past Fuller Lectures: HERE
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