Successive ways nature and the city are understood have affected the field of landscape architecture, first distinguished as a profession, differing from landscape gardening, by Frederick Law Olmsted in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The field's purview has considerably broadened, beyond attendant grounds or parks, to larger entities such as watersheds or regions or campuses, with their land use and circulation patterns and their "growth nodes." Today the remediation of "brownfields" and other urban detritus is an increasing source of commissions. Possibly no discipline has recently influenced landscape architecture as much as plant ecology, with the landscape profession's becoming a manifestation of "applied ecology." This tutorial course will ponder the work of such deliberate outdoor shapers as Swedish park and playground designers, a Brazilian's "painting" grounds with flowers, and a Canadian's re-creating indigenous vegetation (as in a permanent "work of art" outside the National Gallery of Art in Ottawa). Formalist, naturalistic, and other styles, or works, likely receiving our attention in the United States will include: a schema for shaping urban sprawl; Afro-American community planning in Oakland (as an example of "process"); the grassing-over of roofs at Ford's River Rouge plant; and the rehabilitation of abandoned sites like a former elevated rail spur in New York City-all these landscape compositions, or proposals, being the works of acclaimed "masters" or "rising" practitioners.. Requirements: Students will meet with the instructor in pairs for an hour each week; they will write a five-page paper every other week (five in all), and comment on their partners' papers in alternate weeks. Emphasis will be placed on developing skills in viewing in our mind's eye, and articulating verbally, the complexities of sometimes extensive outdoor spaces and in interpreting these designs, as well as constructing arguments and responding to them, in both written and oral critiques. There will be an obligatory all-day field session to Boston (in the company of a current practitioner, Nancy Shapero '81). No prerequisites. Enrollment limit: 10 (expected: 10).