Planting Plans for Patch Test, Roof Garden, and Union Square, Ace McNamara

Germination Proposal, Ace McNamara

Urban Dyeing

Kira Appelhans | Apr 23, 01:56 PM | digg del.icio.us

Victoria Marshall, founder of Till Design and an assistant professor in Urban Design at Parsons, is exploring a new approach to landscape architecture in a seminar course, Urban Dyeing, a part of the new Integrated Design Curriculum (IDC). The course “aims to educate [students] about plants, gardening, garden design, public space and participatory models of engagement.” The course is unique in that it takes landscape design, community action and cross-disciplinary thinking into the classroom and then back out onto the streets.

Urban Dyeing grew out of a seminar Professor Marshall taught last year in which IDP fashion and IDP urban students proposed growing plants that could be used for dyeing fabrics. The fabric would then be used to make clothing that would be sold at the Union Square market. This idea developed at the end of the semester and so this spring a new group of students is testing the idea. The class this spring is teamed up with the Unions Square Partnership, a business improvement district, and has several real sites to design and in which they will grow plants with a purpose. 

At their mid-review in March, students pinned up photos of material test studies and their first pass at designs for sites in Union Square Park and the 14th street corridor. As part of the IDC, this class is open to students across The New School University and attracted a range of students, many from the Environmental Studies program. For most of them this was their first time using the design process to create a project. They were thinking about gardens, gardeners and the people who play those rolls when the projects are public space in an urban setting. 

While the students wrestled with creating a sense of ownership and responsibility for a planted tree pit, they also delved into hands-on studies of making and growing. In their patch test, aka.material studies, they constructed containers for sprouting and growing plants and weather-tested them on balconies, fires escapes and roofs. They are sprouting seeds in their windowsills for a May 14 planting in a Parsons School roof garden, Union Square Park and neighborhood tree planters.

To ensure that the plants will be maintained over the summer, Parsons has agreed to care for the roof garden. The street plantings will be maintained by a student gardener, funded by the New School. The plants will be harvested in the fall and used in the sister class called Natural Dyeing taught by Laura Sansone. Her mobile dyeing cart will be wheeled into the park and the dyeing will therefore be a public event ie. Boiling plants and wool. Students will be making a product line from this which may include clothes plus more sewn gardens.

Professor Marshall’s approach successfully incorporates principles of landscape architecture and urban design to engage other disciplines in a hands-on way that brings depth, complexity and opportunity to the projects. She has created a course that is accessible to a wide range of interests and through the reality of building and growing these projects, adds a measure of practicality to the study of landscape design. Though Urban Dyeing is an undergraduate seminar, it has successfully conveyed the exciting potential of thinking at multiple scales and through multiple disciplines and sets a precedent for a new approach to the traditional landscape architecture studio that programs across the country should explore.