The course introduced new tools and techniques for the students to use in their design careers. Birkeland had them utilize the Stuckeman School’s 3D scanning and printing resources to make objects. “They have been making models and big drawings. I’ve also been trying to teach graphic style – how to produce an image, with some funny results occasionally,” she laughs. For their first project, she gave the groups each a miniature bust of a musical composer. They scanned the busts and made 3D digital models of the musicians. “There were no rules, other than they had to use the face to make a landscape. The range of drawings and ideas was interesting. There are so many facets of landscape architecture, so I wanted to remove the speedbumps so they could be creative, and wouldn’t get paralyzed.”
To provide her students with exposure to iconic memorials and landscapes, Birkeland took the class on field trips to New York City and Washington, D.C. “I wanted to get them thinking about future [design] by seeing memorials from the past," she said. "We saw the National September 11 Memorial, Federal Plaza, Washington Square Park, FDR Memorial, and the Irish Hunger Memorial.” She had each student select a site and make a graphic timeline of its development and reflect on it “as if they took a snapshot of the world in one hundred years, ‘what would that memorial be?’” She laughed, “There was a range of depressing and horrible propositions from ‘everyone is dead,’ to ‘New York is underwater,’ to ‘robots had taken over.’ There was a droid charging station, flying cars…some more outrageous than others…funny ones.”
The students had the freedom to choose a topic for their own memorial, about an event, or a person, or something from their imagination for their final project. Birkeland didn’t set constraints, like, “make sure 20 cars can park on the site.” She explained, “I wanted them to be creative about how everything is expressed and how form comes out of their ideas...It differs from the real world when dealing with real problems, clients, cities, communities where there are constraints and budgets, but they want innovative ideas, new ways to experience a place. Like in any discipline, for example, in the field of medicine or science, it is all about the exploratory phase. This is where new and big ideas happen.”
These ideas were well demonstrated in the dynamic and varied projects. Birkeland explained, “The projects ranged in subject from Prince, to the Pulse Nightclub shooting in Orlando, to bullying…one student created a virtual space for adoptees to come together. They took on a broader language than I anticipated.”
Birkeland described a few exemplary student projects that represent the diversity of topics covered. “Karen Kuo’s project is completely in virtual reality. Yesterday she bought a digital component that reads a heart rate, and will sync up with a computer, and as heart rate changes the environment changes…this virtual memorial presents the concept that landscape architecture doesn't have to be in a physically planted environment – it can be any space where you live your life. This idea opens doors to let students walk through and explore for themselves what is interesting to them.”
When reflecting on the assignment, Kuo realized, “I have been fortunate not to have experienced traumatic events in my life. But then I realize everyone has losses; it can be an object, or a place, or people. Yet there are no memorials for loss of objects or places.” So, she set out to create a virtual memorial for those losses – a virtual space to process grief. “I wanted to create a place to share collective memory. Maybe about a single event. I wanted to create a place that is private, immediate and intimate, that is right there whenever you want it.” She designed a virtual space with a lot of rooms that each represent the different stages of grief.