Each year, the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Colorado Denver takes third-year Master of Landscape Architecture students to locations across the United States, expanding their experiences beyond the familiarity of Denver and introducing them to new places, people, and community needs. In recent years, students visited the Great Basin Desert, New Orleans, and, most recently, the Natchez Trace Parkway.
The Natchez Trace Parkway
Assistant Professor Louise Bordelon led the immersive landscape architecture studio, which examined monuments, perspectives, and cultural challenges along the Natchez Trace Parkway, a cultural byway spanning 444 miles from Natchez, Mississippi to Nashville, Tennessee. Bordelon’s research and work-in-progress manuscript, Neglected Narratives: Nature, Culture, and Colonialism on the Natchez Trace Parkway, investigates and highlights untold stories of lesser-known minorities who inhabit the parkway. Now, students from her studio know firsthand the impact and importance of this work in understanding cultural landscapes.
“The parkway is juxtaposed against the somewhat wilder, kudzu-infested landscape of southern Mississippi that sits outside of NPS jurisdiction amidst the economic struggles and depopulation of some of the poorest rural areas in the American South,” Bordelon said. “Amidst growing concerns for equity and representation, this studio prompted students to redesign a piece of the Natchez Trace landscape to showcase and celebrate lesser-known relics of the landscape.”
Lecturer and Director of the Visual Resource Center Jesse Kuroiwa also traveled with the immersive studio, providing insights from his investigations into monuments and memorials (as taught in his Embodying Memory course) and assisting students with the photographic aspects of their studies. Kuroiwa also photographed key moments during the travel component of the studio.
“I hope that students were able to deeply experience a place that is not familiar to them on a day-to-day basis,” said Kuroiwa.” In a world where we are increasingly living in our “bubbles,” actively seeking out knowledge and experience outside of those bubbles has never been more important. I would hope that students saw how deeply important memory can be to the construction of the idea of place and how sites of public memory (such as monuments and memorials) serve to both reflect values of the past and impact the present/future. As artists and designers, it is critical to understand how our choices impact ideas, systems, and people.”
“Final projects included,” Bordelon said, “an art park dedicated to remembering the 235,000 slaves sold at the Natchez Slave Market, a new urban space based around the notion of quilting as activism for the town of Port Gibson, Mississippi, a remembrance trail that highlights civil rights locations in Port Gibson, a water quality infrastructure project to reframe ‘rural’ as a negative term and mitigate flooding, and a musical reinvention of the road to celebrate the Mississippi music triangle.”
The Student Experience
Master of Landscape Architecture student Rachel Thody completed the fall immersive studio and shared her reflections on the experience.
“This immersive studio, in particular, was incredibly valuable because it underscored the significance of really getting to know a place before even thinking about putting pen to paper and coming up with a concept,” Thody said. “The more informed we are about physical and human geography, the better designs we can produce. Asking the tough questions and holding uncomfortable conversations is the only way we can explore how to make meaningful changes in the environments around us through our designs.”
“It’s critical that we address [environmental and societal issues] head-on in our industry because our job is to mediate the relationship between people and the environment,” Thody continued. “This immersive really solidified my decision to pursue landscape architecture and motivated me to keep being curious about everything around me!”
Master of Landscape Architecture student Aidan Nowell also shared his thoughts on the experience.
“Being in a new environment facilitated a full bursting of my bubble—I had never visited the deep American South before,” Nowell said. “A large portion of the MLA education last semester featured critiquing as a practice. While it’s relatively easy to sit in a classroom and critique something from many angles, being on the ground in a place like Natchez Trace helped show that realistic, implementable landscape design solutions to those critiques are incredibly difficult to conceive.”
When asked about his biggest takeaway from the experience, Nowell said: “Landscape architecture alone cannot solve the world’s problems—outside support from social, political, and economic perspectives is mandatory to foster meaningful change. Real-world landscape architecture doesn’t exist in a vacuum but rather sits in a sociopolitical context, and our built environment is a reflection of society’s values.”
Thank You
Special thanks to Evelyn Volz, associate with DHM Design, who served as the Natchez Trace expert along the studio’s Mississippi adventures, and to the studio’s hosts in Port Gibson, Mississippi, who shared their community with our students and became friends and advocates for our work and ideas in their town and state.