Fuller Initiative for Productive Landscapes
The Fuller Initiative for Productive Landscapes (FIPL) is an internationally recognized center 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
Students earn 6 University of Oregon credits while living and learning for four 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. Weekly 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
2023 Topic: The Working Forest
Work is labor, production, function, and practice. How can a forest work to benefit its inhabitants, its human associates, and its future? The focus of the field school’s work will be the hardwood forest on the Fullers Overlook property. We will seek ways the forest can be productive for itself as well as for the people who steward it. We will do this work through field work, drawing, building in the forest, and ultimately designing. The field school will culminate in an exhibit of design work and proposals for the future of Overlook’s now devastated hardwood forest (a result of an infestation of Emerald Ash Borer)
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.
2023: Andrew S Yang
Andrew Yang’s research moves across the landscapes of visual art, the natural sciences, and expanded history. His projects have been exhibited from Oklahoma to Yokohama, including the 14th Istanbul Biennial, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Spencer Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, with recent curatorial projects Earthly Observatory at SAIC Galleries and Making Kin – Worlds Becoming for the Center for Humans and Nature. His writing can be found in Leonardo, Biological Theory, Art Journal and the Routledge Handbook of Art, Science, and Technology Studies as well as Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations. Yang received his PhD in biology from Duke University and his MFA in visual arts from Lesley College of Art & Design – he is Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a research associate at the Field Museum of Natural History.
Link to past Fuller Lectures: HERE
Recent Awards and Publications
2023: ASLA-Oregon Honor Award, Professional Pro-Bono, ‘Oregon Experience Laboratory,’ Fuller Initiative Land Lab
ASLA-Oregon Green Ribbon Award, Professional Climate Action, ‘Oregon Experience Laboratory,’ Fuller Initiative Land Lab
2022: ASLA-National Student Honor Award, Communications, ‘Recovery Following Wildfire’
Michael Geffel, et al. “Viridic Disturbance: Reprogramming the Tools of Landscape Maintenance.” LA+ Green 15, 2022.
See all awards and publications: HERE