This course will help students-individual users to earn fundamental design skills to create a set of drawings for any master plan from schematic design to design development, including 2D CAD drawing, illustration, and image post production. The course will outline the thinking process and typical workflows by using case studies and inviting guest speakers. The course encourages innovative design thinking and unique graphic representation.

This second-level CAD course is for individuals already having a basic knowledge of AutoCAD who desire to explore and extend their expertise focusing on site design graphics. Students will learn about incorporating files from other design consultants and illustrative techniques available in AutoCAD to highlight pertinent information for site plans, sections, and elevations. Additional techniques will be covered in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator in order to create content for AutoCAD.

*Pre-requisite: DME2044

This lecture/seminar course explores the recent and contemporary debates in landscape architecture and urban design and concentrates on the discourses of urban planning since the late nineteenth century and how contemporary urban debates led to current trends in practice. In this course, we will discuss theories, histories and practices that have shaped our understanding of urban design. We will survey the ideas of influential people who have addressed urban problems and changed the shapes of human settlements, suburbs, cities and regions through urban design and development. We will analyze the values implicit in each of their proposals, stressing the fact that urban design is not only a physical design process but a balancing of political, economic, cultural and physical factors that impact a place and its inhabitants. The course will also provide information about why urban design is a collaborative work and what range of professions are involved. In this framework, the relationship between urban design, landscape design, architecture and planning will be discussed and the contemporary debates about the significance of these relationships will be studied further.

This course is an introduction to botany and the evolution of plant science. The course presents students with the various aspects of plant characteristics, from their aesthetic quality to their fuel value at both a micro and macro scale. The emphasis is on traditional and technical knowledge, and will directly complement the existing and vital relationships between plants, animals, and human beings. Field trip explorations will include studies and observations on plant physiology and form, plant ecology, plant communities, and biodiversity, as well as basic plant classification and identification. Understanding plant growth forms, reproduction and dispersal mechanisms will lead to appreciation of horticulture and design. The course will also explore the relationships between native vegetation, invasive plants and managed plantings. The use of basic computer skills is required; digital cameras are encouraged to facilitate documenting fieldwork and diagnostic plant features.

Through lecture, discussion and project exercises, this course will explore the relationships of ecological communities in diverse environments, the implications of landscape patterns, and how landscape scale affects ecosystem processes from rural to urban. Students will consider conservation and management issues at the landscape scale as part of a holistic approach to systems thinking. Key concepts of landscape and urban ecological systems will be examined through the application of concepts to students’ own scaled design proposals. Students will explore the opportunity for redefining our social relation to nature, and our role in doing so as designers, as a way to course correct climate change.