Thesis

[Jason Granado]

Ok guys like my previous post, I am a student getting my graduate degree in LA.  I am about a year away from starting my thesis, but I am currently trying to discover something that I will be able to conduct my thesis about. I am currently looking into how landscape architects can use their ability of design in a sense of defensive architecture. how landscape architects are used within the military on site design, cartography and any other aspect.

I know as of right now the topic is huge and my thoughts are still scattered,and thats ok. but if anyone has any thoughts or advice or anything else they would like to lend into this research I apreciate it very much.  I will be using this thread to hold all my thoughts and post any research that I find.

 

jason

 

P.s. post what your thesis was about would be nice to find any correlations.

[Matt Sprouse]

search the online UGA library for Philip Wislar’s thesis on this subject in 1998.  He now has a consultant business in this field near DC.

[Tosh K]

The Corps is your best source, if you can get them to open up; contemporary practice may be more difficult.  McHarg might be interesting to look into.  Robert E Lee’s service in the Corps may show some examples of what is now landscape architecture (both in war time Mexico and in peace time fortification repairs and the realigning of the flow of the Mississippi at St Louis).

 

Thesis: Cultivating sustained environmental ethics in the everyday urban landscape (a case study in my ongoing study of phenomenology and sustainability, designing toward an embodied sustained environmental ethic).

 

Overlap may be in the active construction and use of military defense facilities by its defenders, or the feedback loop of military installations particularly in active war zones.  A thesis should be personal, and meaningful to you (the worst thesis reviews in my opinion are dry and try to be uber-intellectual to make up for the lack of passion, ending in a rather mediocre product).  I would imagine there being a big gap between permanent installations and temporary ones as well as type of operation (NORAD/SAC/USN/USA/USAF/CIA, supply/training/deployment, command/forward base, etc); also era/type of combat or anticipated conflict.  There is also the increasingly hot topic of post-military sites.

[Matt Sprouse]

so sorry.  I just looked up that thesis and it is not what I thought it was.  Someone at UGA had a very similar thesis in 1997 or 1998.

[Chupacabra]

A good introductory book on the planning of US military installations is America Town.

 

Are you interested in design for military bases or in security design as it is applied to conflict zones?

 

The former is done by ACoE, the various branches, and consultants who specialize in military work (architects, LAs, Planners, Civils, etc.). Also, security design for civilian areas was a hot topic area post 9/11 and quite a bit has been developed there.

 

The latter, with some exceptions such as the Green Zone and hot embassies, is usually done by SeaBees or combat engineers or infantry and is a bit…ephemeral…and typically not the work of professional designers.  That isn’t to say that there isn’t plenty to research.  Start with the Sumerians and work forward in time.

[Chupacabra]

A good resource or case study might be the Laws of the Indies.  This was the administrative tool that guided the establishment of military outposts in the Spanish New World.  It included design guidelines that morphed civilian and military.  To this day, many Latin American towns are centered around a Plaza De Las Armas that served as parade deck, social space, and inner defensive perimeter in case of siege, but that now is the communities central plaza.

[Jason Granado]

Everyone thank you for  the responses. this is some great information you all are providing.

 

This was a topic that I wanted to research, it is still very early in the game to really pin point what I want to do but I would love to stay within the realm of the military. I’ll be looking at some of the resoruces you guys gave me and will updating soon.

thanks again

[Trace One]

I would contact a public relations person at State Department – they have had to retrofit hundreds of embassies and consulates throughout the world for defense, since the eighties, specifically since the Beirut bombing in 1983, and they have an active program for Embassy retrofitting  for defense – in fact, this is one place to look for a job, if you want to travel.

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