The Making for Placemaking graduate seminar guides students to develop a design narrative within a site-specific context as an opportunity to experiment and test ideas of landscape, both as a strategy for city building and as an experience of place through design. The seminar offers a tactile approach – through sketches, construction detailing, model making and final temporary public installation – that encourages students to think differently about materials in the landscape and how different materials influence the site and the essence of the places where we live. A series of exercises presented through the term, building in complexity, are inspired and informed by the three critical forces of landscape architecture: material, form, and process. Grounded by the professional practice of design detailing as a key language of landscape practice, theories of place-specificity and public art and through case study discussion, the seminar asks:

How can the material elements of public space inspire and elevate the human experience to give new meaning to our shared outdoor spaces? How can our needs for light, rest, shade, privacy, social interaction and beauty translate into an artistic experience of space; where the elements designed for public use blur the line between public infrastructure, landscape design, urbanism and public art?

Ending with an onsite exhibition featuring the student’s final work, the seminar is an opportunity to experiment and to build skills in the construction and communication of place-specific detail design, pushing our work as designers to move beyond functionality and into the realm of the senses. The study site along along the West Toronto Railpath, a section of unused land, is an energized, visually accessible node that allows students’ ample opportunity to explore the dynamic surrounding ecology, industrial character, a changing community and the integration of multi modes of transit that will influence the student’s work.

From a slow build up and layering of concept, site analysis and material exploration exercises, individual projects build to the final group works, installed and reviewed on the selected Railpath site. Grounded by theory through practice, the precise skills of detail design for construction documents combine with the loose play of hand sketching and then the more precise work of model building to result in final work inspired by the ideas of land art, landscape, public art and the study of a place.