Newsletter of the College of Architecture at Texas A&M University
“Arising Forefronts: Are We Prepared?”
Luminary speakers, design charettes and roundtable discussions highlighted Aggie Workshop 2009, the annual three-day conference organized and hosted by the Texas A&M student chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects.
The 2009 Aggie Workshop, held Feb. 19-21 at the Langford Architecture Center on the Texas A&M campus, marked the 34th consecutive year for the event.
David Yocca, a principal with the Conservation Design Forum, an Elmhurst, Ill. firm specializing in integrated water-based ecological design delivered the keynote address.
Yocca talked about fundamental ecological design principles, historic ecosystems, and how they worked before the arrival of Europeans in the West, as well as the impact of conventional design practices and why they’re unsustainable.
He stressed the importance of “green” practices and offered numerous examples of design and preservation projects his firm had completed.
“We are a team of landscape architects, planners and water resource engineers, but we’re always in collaboration with architects, planners, engineers, sociologists, and a whole host of others,” he said, “whoever can bring essential perspective to whatever a design problem is about.”
The fundamental, founding principle behind of Conservation Design Forum, Yocca said, comes from recognizing that “high quality, diverse, stable landscape systems, are valuable, irreplaceable, and when they are discovered, need to be identified, protected, restored and nurtured.”
In addition to attending lectures, the 2009 Aggie Workshop attendees participated in a design charette led by landscape architecture professionals, as well as a graphic design workshop led by John Moon, an illustrator/designer at TBG Partners.
Two roundtable discussions, one consisting of Texas A&M landscape architecture program former students, and another featuring veterans landscape architects, closed out the three-day workshop.
“This year’s event,” said Kelli Ivy, chair of the ASLA Workshop committee, “explored what landscape architects have accomplished, are accomplishing and aspiring towards, and revealed innovative ideas and career paths.”
The workshop theme, “Arising Forefronts: Are We Prepared?” responded to the continual change in the world’s natural and designed elements.
“Through well-planned, sensitive design and construction processes, we can accommodate the growing human population and still conserve and sustain the natural environments and integrity of the land,” she said.
