by Kaylin Slaughter, Student ASLA, and Kenneth Hurst, ASLA

In May of 2021, a class of students from Texas A&M studied immersive spaces using landscape journals, pocket sized notebooks within which to record field sketches.
That trip opened a rift in the bubble of design education, spilling out new possibilities and bringing forth questions about what opportunities are missed as students sit hunched over a textbook in their hometowns. The key takeaway from the trip was that travel and site engagement allows students to make multi-faceted, personal relationships with the site. While case studies, textbooks, and design stories may create a primary understanding of site design, this trip demonstrated that an in-person engagement with the built environment provides deep connections that cannot be replicated with words.
The students’ first assignment was to produce hand-drawn field sketches within simple Moleskine sketchbooks. The student could decide what the object of those sketches would be, so long as they interpreted that element’s contribution to the site as critical. Upon their return home, the students would compile their sketches into a presentation, turning some into construction documents, and writing up a synthesis for the trip.