School of Planning, Design and Construction

Landscape architecture is often misunderstood as a profession and is near absent in popular culture. We have much to do to expand our K-12 outreach and to attract a more diverse audience.  Over the past year, the goal of my Fellowship with the Landscape Architecture Foundation has been to use narrative and storytelling to expose a young and diverse audience to the profession of landscape architecture through the creation of a graphic novel.

This effort is a continuation of a project started over 20 years ago when I was a student in the landscape architecture department at Michigan State.  Comics and cartooning have always been an amateur passion of mine, and my final degree project explored using a comic book to introduce kids to the profession of landscape architecture.  Our project, the Super Sustainable Landscape Architects won Andrew Deer and I an ASLA Student award in 2000, but was unfortunately shelved after graduation, as we went off to launch our careers as actual landscape architects.

After serving as the chair of the K-12 Outreach committee for the Boston Chapter of ASLA and seeing my own kids enjoy graphic novels, I returned to the idea and pitched it to LAF as part of the Fellowship for Innovation and Leadership.  Over the past year, the Fellowship has supported me developing a story that will resonate on many levels with kids and adults alike.  I’ve also explored its potential as a useful teaching tool in and outside the classroom using hands-on exercises that directly related to the educational standards of Common Core and Next Generation Science Standards.  You can find more information on the graphic novel at www.landscapegraphicnovel.com as well as signup on the pre-order list to help jumpstart the publication of this resource.

The presentation of the work can be found at https://www.lafoundation.org/news/2023/03/2023-laf-symposium-and-awards-dinner#symposium