Category: A 50-year Journey to Discover a Fun, Comfortable Way to Learn Landscape Architectural Design

As lines move through space they inscribe planes: ground planes, vertical planes, overhead planes. Together they confine, enclose, and direct views and movement. As words collect on a page they produce a two dimensional feature called a paragraph which, in increasing detail, expresses sequential messages leading to a story or narrative. In Basic Design the…

In Landscape Architecture as Storytelling there are chapters devoted to exploring point, line, plane(s), and volumetric spaces as they appear and are applied in Language, Basic Design, and Landscape Design. For now, here is a simple overview. A single point or dot on a blank canvas is like that first word in an essay. The…

Imagine you are in a white out in a snowstorm. Actually, that situation has a lot of similarities with a blank canvas, page, or computer screen. Ever experience vertigo while scuba diving? You lose all sense of right, left, here, there, which way is up, and where is the road or the water’s surface? In…

I can’t remember how I got from those realizations, those clarifications of what expresses good design experiences, to what I came to call The Analogy but somehow, I arrived at the development of a three-tiered learning tool that integrates language, basic design, and landscape design (Scarfo, 2022, 18). Here is a quick introduction to The…

For me, a new, clearer understanding of what made for good, if not great design was taking shape. Considering the sequencing of people’s anticipated experiences was given greater detail by asking, in a sense, Betty Edwards’ “what is it I don’t see?” Experiences as acted out, as people’s physical behaviors or better yet their body…

As you’ll come to realize, Simonds’ “aha” moment (1961, 225) is the cornerstone of Landscape as Storytelling. Feeling something critical was missing from his education, something keeping him from developing superior designs, his wondering was rewarded with the realization that we design “…not places, spaces, or things [but] experiences (my italics). The places, spaces, and…

A few years went by. A couple years in the Air Force, some employment in a multidisciplinary design firm, and I’m back at school to earn a masters in landscape architecture. Fortunately, my teaching experience, and design firm background found me with a number of landscape courses waived but still having to make up the…

Shortly after graduation, with only my Bachelor’s degree, I was fortunate enough to get a teaching position in an accredited landscape architecture program. I knew I wanted to teach from my first semester in design to this point. Yes, I was a bit intimidated. Heck almost half my class was older than I was, but…

I arrived in my first landscape architecture studio having transferred from Civil Engineering. With me came a strong math science background. So, when presented with my first design project, and believing there was some hidden way to approach it, I raised my hand and asked, “What’s the formula?” The response, which at the time I…

One reason for all the jargon in landscape, architecture, and interior design, for the ambiguity, and for the assumptions is what Larson (1977) refers to as a part of The Rise of Professionalism (in regard to landscape architecture see Vernon, 1987). All professions create entry level experiences that seem to scream “I know something you…