Why is this Landscape Architecture class drawing students from all over campus?
By Maggie Ginsberg and Aaron Granat, Division of the Arts
Inside the sunny, corner classroom in Microbial Sciences that hosts Landscape Architecture 373: Mindfulness in Restorative Environments, jumbo windows stretch all the way to the ceiling. As soon as Teaching Faculty Nathan Larson enters, the first thing he does is lift the shades. If his students are going to be indoors, he wants them to still be able to gaze upon the 150-year-old swamp white oak reaching its gnarled limbs to a shifting sky.
“I specifically requested this room,” he says, pointing out the proximity to the D.C. Smith Greenhouse across the street, where students sometimes go to meditate or journal, and to Allen Centennial Garden around the corner, which he calls their outdoor classroom — a resource similar to the one his LA 373 students co-design each year with kindergarten through fifth graders at Mendota Elementary School, one of LA 373’s community partners.
“The focus of the class is about affecting positive change, which is a focus shared with many Department of Planning and Landscape Architecture courses,” Larson says. Housed within the College of Letters & Science, LA 373 is a Morgridge Center for Public Service Community-Based Learning course, which means it includes 25 hours of community engagement. “How do we affect positive change through a planning and design process, and then, especially in our class, through a co-design process?”
Judging by current and former students, that positive change is effective, profound, and meaningful. In addition to Landscape Architecture and Landscape and Urban Studies, LA 373 attracts an impressive variety of majors: Aerospace Engineering, Spanish, Environmental Studies, Political Science, Design Studies, Computer and Data Sciences, Classical Humanities, and more. Undergraduates, graduate students, and Ph.D. candidates alike come for the robust teaching and learning environment, but come away with skills, philosophies and practices they’ll use for the rest of their personal and professional lives.
“I actually took this class the spring of my freshman year, and I genuinely believe that it did shape the rest of my college experience,” says Jordyn Czyzewski, a UW–Madison senior triple majoring in Landscape and Urban Studies, Geography, and Environmental Studies. She is also pursuing certificates in Global Health and Integrative Design of Built and Natural Environments, and she’s opted for a UW Study Abroad program in Kyoto called “UW Wellbeing and the Art of Forest Bathing in Japan,” connecting to the concepts explored in LA 373.
“Taking this class was the foundation of all of my other interests,” Czyzewski says. “I’m just so excited to expand even more on my knowledge and be able to apply some of these concepts outside of Madison, across the world.”
What is Mindfulness in Restorative Environments?
It’s easy to understand the health benefits of mindfulness practices like meditation, and the ways in which public spaces can serve as both beautiful gathering hubs and even sources of food, as in community gardens. LA 373 aims to take those concepts and apply them in an academic setting to create meaningful public spaces that measurably improve and restore the health and well-being of entire communities — especially when co-designed in concert with those communities.
“We need restorative environments because they promote health and well-being,” Larson says. “These vibrant places where people connect with each other and the natural world. They’re incredibly valuable places, and there’s a scarcity of them.”
In many ways, the LA 373 class itself serves as a restorative environment for UW students. Each Wednesday class begins with meditation, an intentional pause in an otherwise busy, often stressful day. Throughout the semester, students participate in class discussions, readings, reflections, writing, observational study, site visits, research, assessment, design and co-design, peer review, class presentations, and independent and group project work. But more than half their class time is spent outside. They wander Lakeshore Nature Path, noting the dappled light or the birdsong, and make field trips to intentionally designed, restorative places like Troy Kids’ Garden and the Madison Children’s Museum. The museum’s rooftop pollinator garden offers a particularly unique perspective, and not just of the city skyline with UW–Madison in the distance.
“You look out across the city and just see all of these flat, concrete roofs, and you’re thinking, ‘Oh, this could be different,’” Larson says. “So I think that’s helped our students get that sense of what could be, what’s possible.”
Co-Designing in, for, and with Community
One of LA 373’s signature midterm projects is the “outdoor rejuvenation room” design, in which students reimagine spots on campus that could be designed as restorative environments. But the full semester-long project is the co-design with MMSD’s Mendota Community Elementary School kids — called “scholars” — as the children continue to use and evolve their elementary school garden and outdoor classroom. Utilizing insights gleaned on a site visit early on in the semester, along with surveys, drawings, and other input from these young scholars, LA 373 students spend the semester co-designing options for the community school space.
“It’s been a great program, I think reciprocally for both partners,” says Kelley Hutchison-Maravilla, an occupational therapist at Mendota Community School. “Learning about a community, listening to what the community wants, valuing what they want and supporting them, is really beneficial. It’s real, it’s not theory.”
Sometimes the young scholars use artwork to communicate their plans, depicting themselves digging in a worm garden, or relaxing beneath a leafy tree with “all those fall colors sprinkling over my head.” Others envision whimsical features that might be harder to put into practice — say, an archway made of jellybeans, or a “fidget tree” that grows tactile, soothing toys — but LA 373 students still consider the spirit of the request in their co-designs.
New this semester, 12 Mendota Community School fifth graders took a field trip to campus to review the progress on their co-design projects. They hopped a city bus, stopped first for Babcock ice cream, then filed into the Microbial Sciences classroom to meet with the LA 373 students in small groups, where they were able to share additional feedback.
“Our scholars loved seeing college students take their thoughts seriously — it made them feel proud and connected,” says Mendota Community Schools Resource Coordinator Amanda World. “There’s real co-design work happening here, and there is real possibility.”
These co-designs aren’t just a thought exercise. After a Mendota scholar who uses a wheelchair had a scary moment getting stuck in the garden’s former terrain, the school implemented an LA 373 student’s concept for a redesigned path. World and Hutchison-Maravilla have also put more of the student co-designs in place including accessible tables and benches, an outdoor sink, accessible raised beds, and an arch trellis. It may not be made of jellybeans, but it serves the same spirit.
“It’s a gift to have a university like UW–Madison in our city,” says Hutchison-Maravilla. “I feel that connecting our students to the university is helpful in their life. Seeing longitudinally, ‘Where could I be, what could I do.’”
Landscape Architecture for All
For students who are pursuing careers in urban studies or landscape architecture, LA 373 is hugely helpful in developing communication tools to suss out a community’s needs while gaining experiential knowledge of design concepts.
“I chose it because of the community work,” says Chicago native and Posse Scholar Louis Hilson, a senior majoring in Landscape and Urban Studies, with minors in integrated design and sustainability. “I do a lot of community work outside of this, so I thought that was cool as well, as I’ve always believed in hands-on learning … This class is all hands-on, but we’re working as a class to gain a better understanding of community and nature.”
For Leah Grigas, a senior double majoring in Environmental Studies and Classical Humanities, working so closely with Landscape and Urban Studies and Landscape Architecture was an unexpected bonus of LA 373. She appreciates that they got to experience daily the benefits of the design concepts they were learning, even though she is working toward a different career path.
“It has kind of taught me that even just sitting down in a garden and experiencing the space can be so powerful, especially in education,” she says.
Like Grigas, plenty of the LA 373 students will go on to careers that have nothing to do with landscape architecture or urban planning. But they will likely find opportunities to reimagine the restorative possibilities of the public spaces they share with others in the community.
And you never know where a class like this could lead — Elizabeth “Ely” Rendon certainly didn’t.
The Sky is the Limit
Rendon is currently a Ph.D. student in Design Studies at the School of Human Ecology. After a career in industrial design in her native Colombia, South America, and a Covid pandemic-induced paradigm shift involving isolation and confinement (and the healing effects of plants), she searched the globe for an interdisciplinary university program that might miraculously combine all of these seemingly disparate worlds — and found it at UW–Madison.
“LA 373 was the first class that I saw that I wanted to take,” says Rendon, whose School of Human Ecology adviser agreed it was the perfect complement to her graduate studies. “It was my catalyst to change my life and my professional view. I found the class to be extremely relevant and beautiful.”
As a result of the LA 373 class, Rendon’s research both evolved in unexpected ways and narrowed to a central question: How can mindfulness and interaction with plants support mental health in dealing with isolation and confinement in extreme environments? That’s what she’s working on through her Ph.D. program at the School of Human Ecology, a place that has turned out to be as inspirational and interdisciplinary as she’d dreamed. She’s been able to engage with other UW–Madison departments (including researchers from the School of Pharmacy’s Psychoactive Pharmaceutical Investigation exploring the therapeutic effects of psychoactive components that come from nature), and with prominent alumni like Robert Morrow (Ph.D.’87), lead scientist at Sierra Space, who designed the technology that allows NASA to grow vegetables in space.
“I’m researching the biology of mindfulness, and how working with nature can be anti-inflammatory in your brain and help you to heal, and I’m designing an object that could be integrated into your home that you could use therapeutically, through mindfulness, to help you cope with isolation and confinement,” Rendon says, citing implications for astronauts, polar researchers, submariners, oil rig workers, health workers, even remote workers or patients with chronic, isolating conditions. Unfortunately, she says, in an increasingly disconnected, screen-obsessed, home-bound world, more and more of us are experiencing those “extreme environments.” LA 373’s focus on community engagement and deliberate attention to the natural world proved foundational to Rendon’s career and, she hopes, any number of others.
“This was a very well-designed class to help you open your eyes, not only as a designer, or an architect,” Rendon says, “but as a human.”
BONUS: Watch this video to tag along with LA 373 students as they make floral art at Allen Centennial Garden, explore the Madison Children’s Museum, and engage with Mendota Community School students on their co-design projects. Hear more from Nathan Larson, Louis Hilson and Leah Grigas about what this class means to them.
