Instructor Insights

Instructor Insights pages are part of the OCW Educator initiative, which seeks to enhance the value of OCW for educators.

Course Overview

This page focuses on the course 4.S67 Landscape Experience: Seminar in Land/Art as it was taught by Dr. Rebecca K. Uchill and Professor Caroline Jones in Fall 2016.

This seminar explored “land” as a genre, theme, and medium of art and architecture of the last five decades. Focusing largely on work in the United States, the course sought to understand how the use of land in art and architecture is bound into complicated entanglements of property and power, the inheritances of non-U.S. traditions, and how the term “landscape” is variously deployed in the service of a range of political and philosophical positions.

Students had the opportunity to participate in a pre-term field trip to experience the use of land art and architecture in the American Southwest.

A final research paper or project equivalent was the capstone of the course.

Course Outcomes

Course Goals for Students
  • Understand that landscape is everywhere, and is a construct of our (and others’) subjectivities.
  • Understand that "landscape" is both contested and political.
  • Use immersive fieldwork to reflect on the kinds of sensorial experiences that allow us to know something as a landscape.
  • Explore how the work of artists, architects, and writers on art and architectural theory can offer rich insights into the tangled nexus of phenomenology, pilgrimage, and property development that has been conjured by landscape, in history and at present.
 

Instructor Insights

Documentation can't convey the full contours of experiences—the wind, the smells, the scale, the memories, and so on.

—Dr. Rebecca Uchill

In the following pages, Dr. Rebecca Uchill describes various aspects of how she taught 4.S67 Landscape Experience: Seminar in Land/Art.

 

Curriculum Information

Prerequisites

Instructor permission required

Requirements Satisfied

Elective

Offered

Not offered regularly

The Classroom

  • A classroom with moveable tables and chairs with a seating capacity of 18 and an A/V system.

    Room 1 of 1

    Seminar

    Seminars were held in a classroom with a seating capacity of 18. The room featured moveable tables and chairs, along with an A/V system.

 

Assessment

The students' grades were based on the following activities:

The color used on the preceding chart which represents the percentage of the total grade contributed by participation. 25% Participation (including seminar presentations and MIT List Visual Arts Center lecture presentations)
The color used on the preceding chart which represents the percentage of the total grade contributed by the Capstone project. 75% Capstone project (proposal, in-class presentation, final write-up)
 

Student Information

Twelve students took this course in the fall of 2016.

Breakdown by Year

Mostly graduate students

Breakdown by Major

Mostly the MIT Program in Art, Technology, and Culture (ACT), Master of Architecture (MArch), and History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art (HTC)

 

How Student Time Was Spent

During an average week, students were expected to spend 12 hours on the course, roughly divided as follows:

In Class

3 hours per week
  • Met 1 time per week for 3 hours per session; 12 sessions total; mandatory attendance.
  • Students were assigned specific weeks in which they worked as a team to present a guiding question or questions to tie together the assigned readings and to orient the class discussions.
  • The List Visual Arts Center annual Lavine Lecture was programmed in explicit connection with the course and students worked together to create a visually dynamic 10-minute presentation during the public lecture.
 

Out of Class

9 hours per week

Students completed assigned readings, prepared for in-class presentations and the Lavine lecture, and worked on their capstone projects.

 

Semester Breakdown

WEEK M T W Th F
1 No classes throughout MIT. No classes throughout MIT. No session scheduled. No session scheduled. Class meeeting.
2 No session scheduled. No session scheduled. No session scheduled. No session scheduled. Class meeting.
3 No session scheduled. No session scheduled. No session scheduled. No session scheduled. No classes throughout MIT.
4 No session scheduled. No session scheduled. No session scheduled. No session scheduled. Class meeting.
5 No session scheduled. No session scheduled. No session scheduled. No session scheduled. Class meeting.
6 No classes throughout MIT. No classes throughout MIT. No session scheduled. No session scheduled. Class field trip and due date.
7 No session scheduled. No session scheduled. No session scheduled. No session scheduled. Class meeting.
8 No session scheduled. No session scheduled. No session scheduled. No session scheduled. Class meeting.
9 No session scheduled. No session scheduled. No session scheduled. No session scheduled. Class meeting.
10 No session scheduled. No session scheduled. No session scheduled. Lavine lecture. No classes throughout MIT.
11 No session scheduled. No session scheduled. No session scheduled. No session scheduled. Class meeting.
12 No session scheduled. No session scheduled. No session scheduled. No classes throughout MIT. No classes throughout MIT.
13 No session scheduled. No session scheduled. No session scheduled. No session scheduled. Student presentations.
14 No session scheduled. No session scheduled. No session scheduled. No session scheduled. Student presentations.
15 No session scheduled. No session scheduled. No session scheduled. Due date. No classes throughout MIT.
16 No classes throughout MIT. No classes throughout MIT. No classes throughout MIT. No classes throughout MIT. No classes throughout MIT.
Displays the color and pattern used on the preceding table to indicate dates when classes are not held at MIT. No classes throughout MIT
Displays the color used on the preceding table to indicate dates when lecture sessions are held. Lecture session
Displays the color used on the preceding table to indicate dates when students presentations are held. Student Presentations
Displays the symbol used on the preceding table to indicate dates when assignments are due. Assignment due date
Displays the color used on the preceding table to indicate dates when no class session is scheduled. No class session scheduled
Displays the symbol used on the preceding table to indicate dates when there was a class field trip. Field Trip
Displays the symbol used on the preceding table to indicate dates when there was a Lavine Lecture. Lavine Lecture