OUR THEME /

This year’s theme for LABash is “Compacted Grounds”. As landscape architecture students and professionals, we use this to refer to a common site condition: substandard soils, requiring remediation to allow for new growth. But the term also suggests a rich, thickened, layered landscape history -- a history which has compounded upon itself, ultimately creating the site’s current conditions. This descriptor is characteristic of many of the sites in which we work and many of the wicked problems which we tackle. But it is also characteristic of our own condition.

Landscape architecture has issues. Its achievements and successes are compounded by equally great failures. It has a continuous history of human-led disturbance and intervention, made especially clear through recent demands for social equity, justice, and reciprocity. Through this year’s LABash, we want to challenge designers to critically view our field, to reflect upon how the issues wrought and molded by our past manifest themselves in today’s academic and professional environments. And we challenge ourselves to propose optimistic, empathetic, pragmatic, and meaningful solutions -- to remediate and allow new growth to rise from our compacted grounds.

SCHEDULE AT A GLANCE /

FRIDAY

REGISTRATION / OPENING CEREMONY / RECEPTION

SATURDAY

EXPO / EDUCATION SESSIONS / EVENING SOCIAL

SUNDAY

EXPO / EDUCATION SESSIONS / CLOSING CEREMONY / EVENING SOCIAL

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