Ecology and Two Thesis Lab Cases

The chapter describes the role that landscape architecture research, teaching, and practice can play to contribute to counteract and alleviate the prodromes and consequences of the impending ecological crisis of the Earth system. The chapter further frames the role of landscape architecture teaching and learning within the crisis-ridden phase. It proposes an ethical engagement shared by teachers and students and an intended reformation of human attitude toward non-human nature capable of intervening on every sphere of governance over the surrounding environment, from institutional to personal. The chapter proposes that studio work abandon aesthetic, stylistic, and compositional investigations in favor of a design research centered upon the correspondence between morphology and metabolism of the contemporary heterogeneous landscape. In fact, it proposes to exceed the traditional disciplinary boundaries by espousing an idea of extended landscape, or landscape continuum, that comprises and interfaces natural and humanmade systems. Finally, the chapter presents two recent thesis-studio-lab experiences completed at the Universidad de Monterrey that seem to embody the previously described spirit by bringing an alternative notion of human inhabitation into the natural ecologies and the logics of natural environment into the urban sphere.