Overlook Field School
Our ability to implement sustainability across cultures, geographies, and time depends on how we imagine, value, protect and regenerate the landscapes that provide necessary materials and ecosystem services. In the past, these productive landscapes were often shunted to the periphery of design. The Fuller Initiative for Productive Landscapes engages these landscapes – of food, forests, energy, or waste – and brings them into the discourse of landscape architecture and environmental design.
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.
To learn more about the application process click HERE
See photos from the Overlook Field School HERE
2023: 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).
Designers in Residence: Mary Polites / Ignacio Lopez Buson
Mary Polites is a designer, educator, and researcher focusing on the integration of architectural design and ecological systems through computational tools. She has extensive professional experience in international architecture and landscape architecture offices, managing projects from concept design to construction. She is the principal and co-founder of MAPS (Methods for the Architecture of Patterns and Systems), a teaching and research initiative specialized in developing innovative design solutions for the integration of human-natural systems at all scales.
Mary has taught at Washington State University under the Weller Teaching and Research Fellowship, Tongji University at the Design and Innovation College in Shanghai, the Boston Architectural College in Massachusetts, and the Academy of Art in San Francisco. She has alsoled international workshops related to biomimicry, computational tools, and environmental design for Turenscape Academy in Huangshan, and for the AA Visiting School Program in Xixinan, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Guatemala. Mary is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor in Architecture at the School of Architecture and Environment at the University of Oregon in Eugene.
Her book, The Rise of Biodesign, discusses the development of bio-inspired design and its applications in the current educational and environmental agendas in China. In 2022, she was an artist in residence for the Center for Art Research (CFAR) Project Incubator, a fellowship at the Knight Campus at the University of Oregon, where she explored the potential of digitally fabricated adaptive infrastructures to support the growth of natural systems within the context of architecture, indoor spaces, and health.
Ignacio Lopez Buson is a Spanish architect, landscape architect (OR), and urban designer with international experience in award-winning sizeable projects across Europe, Asia, and the USA. In 2014, he co-founded MAPS (Methods for the Architecture of Patterns and Systems), a teaching and research initiative specialized in developing innovative design solutions for the integration of human-natural systems at all scales. Ignacio believes that the future of cities depends on their adaptation to nature and that technology and its innovative interdisciplinary applications are the primary tools to articulate this integration. Consequently, he embraces digital technologies and is an expert in applying them throughout the entire design process, from territorial analysis and concept design to digital fabrication and visualization. His research revolves around the intersection of environmental science and computational tools in contemporary urban challenges, and he is developing an interdisciplinary teaching methodology that articulates urban planning and landscape design through research, computational tools, and systems thinking. Ignacio has led courses and international workshops related to landscape, urbanism, and architecture, including teaching and guest critic positions at the London-based Architectural Association School of Architecture (AA), the AA Visiting School Program (Shanghai, Shenzhen, Xixinan, and Guatemala), Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), Tongji University in Shanghai, Turenscape Academy in Huangshan, Portland State University (PSU), Boston Architectural College (BAC), and University of Oregon (UO) in the United States.
Program manager: Liska Chan
2022 Topic: Transpecies Design
‘Transpecies design,’ is described by philosopher and College of Design Dean Adrian Parr as “an other-than-anthropocentric approach to regenerating, restoring, reinvigorating, and replenishing the natural environment. Transpecies design honors biodiversity as a common heritage, one we share with other species. Rather than presenting the human experience and flourishing as the goal of design, transpecies design takes the inextricable linkages connecting animals and plants as both the point of departure and the end goal of design. As such, transpecies design moves beyond human experience and behavior serving as the fundamental ingredient for how design decisions are made, and the direction design processes take. Transpecies design engages the substantive realities of a multiplicity of species as both design content and form, harnessing the affective capacity of design to maximize deep flourishing.”
Artist in Residence: Nina Elder
Artist and researcher Nina Elder creates projects that reveal humanity’s dependence on, and interruption of, the natural world. With a focus on changing cultures and ecologies, Nina advocates for collaboration, fostering relationships between institutions, artists, scientists and diverse communities. She is the co-founder of the Wheelhouse Institute, a women’s climate leadership initiative. Nina lectures as a visiting artist/scholar at universities, develops publicly engaged programs, and consults with organizations that seek to grow through interdisciplinary programming.
Program manager: Liska Chan
Program coordinators: Nancy Silvers, Kennedy Rauh, and Celia Hensey
2021: Recovery
recovery noun / plural recoveries
1 : the act, process, or an instance of recovering especially : an economic upturn
2 : the process of combating a disorder (such as alcoholism) or a real or perceived problem
A brief history of 2020: pandemic, police violence, protest, political division, economic recession, catastrophic wildfire. Through these events, landscape simultaneously fostered and required recovery – but the process is far from complete. Analogous to resilience, restoration, and regeneration, recovery is a return to some previous state – perhaps a new normal – and ever more complicated when applied to a medium as dynamic as landscape.
Together with artist-in-residence, David Buckley Borden, the 2021 Overlook program explored the transformation of recovery as it applies to productive landscapes – specifically forests recovering from wildfire. How do we care for the land? How does is take care of us? What is the meaning of recovery in the face of continual trauma?
Artist in Residence: David Buckley Borden
David Buckley Borden is a Cambridge Massachusetts-based interdisciplinary artist and designer. Using an accessible, often humorous, combination of art and design, David promotes a shared environmental awareness and heightened cultural value of ecology. David’s place-based projects highlight both pressing environmental issues and everyday phenomena. Informed by research and community outreach, David’s work manifests in a variety of forms, ranging from site-specific public art installations in the woods to data-driven cartography in the gallery. David was a 2016/2017 Charles Bullard Fellow (Artist-in-Residence) at the Harvard Forest where he answered the question, “How can art and design foster cultural cohesion around environmental issues and help inform ecology-minded decision making?” As a Harvard Forest Associate Fellow David continues to collaborate with Harvard researchers, to champion a cultural ecology supported by interdisciplinary science-communication. David studied landscape architecture at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and worked as a designer at Sasaki Associates and Ground before focusing his independent practice at the intersection of landscape, creativity, and cultural event.
Program manager: Michael Geffel
Program coordinators: Nancy Silvers and Isabela Ospina Rodriguez
2020: Experiment
Scientists have created many experimental landscapes as they move from the controlled environment of the laboratory to the complexity of the world. We have experimental forests and ranges, farms and nurseries, even experimental waterways. Landscape architects frequently draw from this research, but it often must be translated to match our particular design applications. How does the practice of experimentation relate to the design process? What is a design experiment – and what is experimental design? For the 2020 Overlook Field School we will collaborate with artist David Buckley Borden to interrogate these questions as they apply to landscape, which has no clearly defined laboratory boundary, and the discipline of landscape architecture, which typically relies on experience, simulation, and abductive reasoning to develop design proposition.
Artist in Residence: David Buckley Borden
Program manager: Michael Geffel
2019: Difficult Landscapes
Difficult landscapes are those intractable spaces that challenge our faculties; that we struggle to see, understand, manage, and design. Controversy often follows our loss of control as competing interpretations seek to explain what has happened and how we should act. These landscapes can be opportunities for landscape architects but are often outside of traditional practice, particularly when they fall outside of traditional landscape typologies. For the 2019 Overlook Field School we will investigate the difficult landscapes found at the Fuller Center – the barren, the bog and the blighted forest – to explore their meanings and how alternative modes of practice might allow us to engage new territories of landscape architecture.
Artists in Residence: Gwen Dora Cohen & Isaac Cohen
Gwendolyn Dora Cohen is an Associate at Studio Outside Landscape Architecture in Dallas, Texas. She graduated from the University of Virginia with a Master Degree in Landscape Architecture and holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design. Recently she co-taught The Prairie’s Yield, a graduate studio at the University of Texas Arlington. Her work often considers scientific theory and thoughtful moments of joyful whimsy. She is fascinated by novel ecologies in urban spaces, and strives to always bring an interest in the vernacular to her design work. She is an explorer of places hidden in plain sight, and enjoys the urban wilderness that exists in the heart of Dallas.
Isaac Cohen is an Associate at Studio Outside and has a decade of experience working on all aspects of park and urban public space issues. He spent this time working with communities around the country on advocacy and fundraising to build urban park, and on engagement and research into critical issues impacting the use of public space. He brings a wealth of knowledge of Dallas neighborhoods, history, and landscapes that he hopes to integrate into the studio. Isaac has also recently co-lead a studio for the University of Texas at Arlington’s CAPPA Masters of Landscape Architecture program.
Program manager: Michael Geffel
Program coordinator: Summer Young
2018: Maintenance
Maintenance. The word connotes manual labor, banality, mechanism… landscaping. But what do we really mean when we apply the word to landscape? We work with a dynamic and ephemeral medium: plants grow, die back, and change with the seasons; earth compacts, erodes and is deposited; water falls and washes its way down. It is the job of the landscape architect to take these materials and design a space, anticipating its future growth, entropy, and use. The principal way we mediate these processes is through maintenance, when we are confronted with the dissonance between our expectations and the material reality at hand. Defining the essence of maintenance as care, we will investigate the technology, operational logic and effects of this maligned practice to better understand its generative capacity and potential as a design instrument in landscape architecture.
Artists in Residence: Katie Jenkins & Parker Sutton, Present Practice
Katherine Jenkins is an Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Knowlton School and cofounder of the interdisciplinary design-research group, Present Practice. Her work applies theory, techniques, and media from contemporary art to the analysis and design of landscapes. She has conducted fieldwork in California’s agro-industrial valleys, Utah’s alkaline deserts and Alaska’s Arctic, examining the aesthetics of extensive infrastructure as it responds to unique geologic and atmospheric conditions. Current pursuits include The Post-TAPS Project, a study of the spatial demands of oil extraction and the relationship of those demands to the ecological and aesthetic identity of Alaska; and Field Exercises, the development of site analysis and exploratory representation techniques that promote direct engagement in the field while piloting lo-fi digital and analogue tools. Prior to joining the Knowlton School, Jenkins taught in the Department of Landscape Architecture at Cornell University. She has an MLA from the University of Virginia and a BA in painting and printmaking from Yale University.
Parker Sutton is a Lecturer at the Knowlton School and cofounder of the interdisciplinary design group Present Practice. His research explores how perception shapes normative modes of placemaking and design. His work has been published in journals and magazines including Pidgin, The Site Magazine, Bracket, ARID, and Lunch. Prior to joining the Knowlton School, Sutton worked as a designer at several architecture and landscape architecture offices in Brooklyn and San Francisco. He holds a Bachelor of Arts from Princeton University and a Master of Architecture from the University of Virginia.
Program manager: Liska Chan
Program coordinator: Ali Pougiales
2017: Landscapes of Waste
This seminar examined the concept of waste through the lens of landscape architecture. Through readings, field trips, research, and art, student explored the relationship between material culture, material flows, and the environment we create – wittingly or no – for ourselves and other species. Through the seminar, students understood the impact of our consumer culture on the landscape – the extraction, transportation, and disposal of goods, and the wastelands that result. In doing so, students considered landscape architects as form-makers, place-makers and ecosystem engineers; and questioned our role and capacity as designers to explore, expose, and impact these waste lands.
Artists in Residence: Katie Jenkins & Parker Sutton
Jenkins and Sutton were also the artists in residence for the field school in 2018. Please see above for their bios and website links.
Program manager: Liska Chan
Program coordinator: Colin Poranski
2016: Animals as Landscape Agents of Change
This seminar will examine the role animals play in shaping the current and future landscape at multiple scales, from puddles to forests. We will seek to understand the world as an animal perceives it; our demands on animals as co-inhabitants and co-creators of landscapes; and the conflicts and unintended consequences of our relationship with animals as we design and steward landscapes. In doing so, we will consider landscape architects as form-makers, place-makers and ecosystem engineers; and question our role and capacity as design collaborators with other organisms.
Artist in Residence: Phoebe Lickwar
Phoebe Lickwar is a landscape architect, photographer, and assistant professor of landscape architecture at the University of Texas in Austin. She teaches design studios as well as courses in theory, representation, and audiovisual research methods. Her photography explores subjects such as remnant landscapes and urban experience and has been featured in international expositions, including the Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock, Newspace Center for Photography in Portland, Rayko Gallery in San Francisco, Copley Society of Art in Boston, and the Photographic Resource Center at Boston University.
Prior to joining the faculty at UT Austin, Lickwar worked as an associate at PWP Landscape Architecture. While at PWP, Lickwar served in both design and project management roles on projects such as the National 9/11 Memorial, Newport Beach Civic Center and Park, and Glenstone Museum. Lickwar’s research interests include fieldwork methodology, design pedagogy, and agricultural landscapes. She is currently working on a book entitled Farmscape: The Design of Productive Landscapes.
Program manager: Roxi Thoren
Program coordinator: Kelly Stoeklein
2015: Watershed Moment
“Water has become a commodity. Like other commodities, it now divides us between the haves and have-nots. Clean water and sanitation will further define us as nations, in how we carry forward our abilities to care for our peoples and our respect for the community of nations.” -The Very Reverend Dr. James A. Kowalski This seminar will examine the design of waterscapes at multiple scales, from parks and gardens to follies and fountains. We will explore water as a spatial and territorial agent of change, a matrix for design intervention; as a phenomenological and evocative material, a design medium; and as a cultural lodestone, poetry and myth.
Artist in Residence: Dee Briggs
Dee Briggs was born in Western Pennsylvania and raised in the northern panhandle of West Virginia. At the age of 18, Briggs moved to New York City. She studied architecture at the City College of New York and earned a Master of Architecture degree from Yale University in 2002. Briggs currently splits her time between Pittsburgh and New York. She has taught in the schools of art and architecture at Carnegie Mellon University and exhibits nationally.
Workshop Instructor: Emily Steinberg
“Emily Steinberg works in an Expressionist-Realist style, combining an innate awkwardness with superior painting and drawing technique. She approaches her subjects…with equanimity and imbues them with the unique, wobbly energy that emanates from her hand. If you funneled the strange vitality of Charles Burchfield through the clear structure of Edward Hopper, you would get Emily Steinberg’s emotional portraits of everyday subjects.” -Elizabeth Johnson
Workshop instructor: Paul Rider
The compelling issue that has driven photographer Paul Rider’s work is the interface and struggle between nature and manmade urban culture. All his photographic projects share an elegant, visually compelling narrative and strong, thoughtful, almost sculptural composition.
Program manager: Roxi Thoren
Program coordinator: Veronica Malinay
2014: Landscapes of Power
The goal of the seminar is to engage energy in ways that are resourceful, efficient, and poetic. We will focus on how environmental designers and planners can meaningfully contribute to the conversation about the sustainability, aesthetics, and ethical use of land in the process of power generation, distribution, and use. We will study current and emerging practices of power generation in the Pacific Northwest, including hydroelectricity, wind, solar, geothermal and biomass. Through readings, site visits, graphic analysis, and design, we will explore the disconnect between people and infrastructure. So many of the systems we rely on are invisible: water flows when we turn the tap and lights glow when we flip a switch. This disconnect between system design and resource use generates indifference and ignorance; we cannot care about that which we do not see. This seminar reveals the infrastructure and potential of power.
Artists in Residence: Design 99 – Gina Reichert and Mitch Cope
Gina Reichert and Mitch Cope founded Design 99 in 2007 to investigate new models of contemporary art and architectural practice. Initially occupying a retail storefront space, the design studio situated itself in the public realm offering over-the-counter design consultations and marketed $99 house call specials. Now embedded in their residential corner of Detroit, Design 99 seeks out opportunities to experiment with art and design within their community. Since 2008, the team has been developing the Power House as a test site for ideas and methods, lo and hi-tech building systems, and a point of conversation for the entire neighborhood. In 2009, Reichert & Cope founded Power House Productions, a nonprofit organization focused on neighborhood stabilization through art and culture.
Workshop Instructor: Michael McGillis
Michael McGillis is an artist based in Detroit. His in situ installations distill the empirical experience of inhabitation, emerging from physically engaging the land, informed by personal interests and unforeseen tangents. His art sifts through the meanings and memories we ascribe to our surroundings, and processes disparate notions of what defines Nature. They highlight the act of being present, fully enveloped in an environment that serves as both work and exhibition space, facilitating a heightened spatial awareness.
Program manager: Roxi Thoren
Program coordinator: Fraser Stuart
2013: Out of the Woods
Out of the Woods will be critically investigating sustainable forestry at the spatial scale of small woodlands and family forests (10-999 acres) and the temporal scale of old growth forests. This investigation will touch on current practices of environmental design, such as in public perception and participation in the decision-making process concerning forest management policy and practices; land planning for forest ecosystems that straddles human needs, such as recreation, hunting, timber, and spiritual renewal, with the needs of other species and the intrinsic values of the forest; visualization across spatially and temporally distant landscapes and events; and expansion of environmental literacy and stewardship through community outreach and education.
The subject matter concerning forest history, management, ecologies, restoration, and ethics is vast. What we can hope to accomplish in this quarter is to provide a nuanced overview of where or how forest issues may intersect with environmental design, as seen through the work and insights of experts in an array of disciplines.
Artist in Residence: Michael McGillis
Michael McGillis is an artist based in Detroit. His in situ installations distill the empirical experience of inhabitation, emerging from physically engaging the land, informed by personal interests and unforeseen tangents. His art sifts through the meanings and memories we ascribe to our surroundings, and processes disparate notions of what defines Nature. They highlight the act of being present, fully enveloped in an environment that serves as both work and exhibition space, facilitating a heightened spatial awareness.
Program manager: Roxi Thoren
Program coordinator: Shelby Fraga
2012: Sustenance
Scholar in Residence: Matthew Potteiger
Matthew Potteiger is a professor of landscape architecture at SUNY-ESF. He is the co-author, with Jamie Purinton, of Landscape Narratives: Design Practices for Telling Stories which uses art, literary theory and cultural geography to reveal the ways that landscapes become repositories for cultural narratives and offers ways of engaging narrative practices in design. He studies the link between food and landscape systems and has presented and published extensively on this topic including in Landscape Journal and in the book, Five Borough Farm II: Growing the Benefits of Urban Agriculture in New York City. He leads an interdisciplinary “food studio” focused on the design of community food systems, including projects for regional foodsheds, public markets, urban agriculture, foraging, and productive ecologies.
Program manager: Roxi Thoren
Program coordinator: Lauren Schwartz