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Landscape Architecture, Industrial Design, Interior Design and Business students are traveling a transect through Western Europe, exploring site design, product design and manufacture, and marketing. Students spend their days studying the design of built places and things, observing cultural and social practices. Evening seminars use discussions of individual sketchbooks, and conversation about discovered curiosities, and challenges to bring focus on the relationships between people, places, and culture.

LAR 4014/5015G landscape architecture students worked with students, faculty and staff in the College of Natural Resources and the Environment and the Division of Campus Planning, Infrastructure, and Facilities to develop site designs around Cheatham Hall that would facilitate social interactions and community building for the college. CNRE Dean Paul Winistorfer invited students to rethink the grounds and propose outdoor space improvements that would provide spaces to meet, hold outdoor classes, and relax. Plans incorporated existing alumni and legacy trees, places for small gatherings and larger areas for college-wide events. This community engagement project resulted in 11 approaches improving the main entry and front courtyard, 11 alternatives for the north lawn, and 22 for the green space between Cheatham and Deitrick Halls.

The LAR 2016/4706 studio focused on site-scale design, tying together and experimenting with the design of topography, water systems, vegetation, structures, materials, movement, and activities. In the first 6 weeks students were introduced to fieldwork methods and techniques, investigative representation modalities, and designing at a scale beyond the domestic or everyday. During the second half of the semester, students tackled what to do with a hole in the ground, speculating on futures for the Virginia Tech Quarry as the Hokie Stone mining is played out.

Over two semesters, fifth year BLA students identified contemporary challenges to the design of our built environment for exploration. In each individual research project, students developed integrated design solutions that reimagined ways to address climate change, sea level rise, phytoremediation of disaster and former industrial sites, post frack sand mined landscapes and environmental education. Others addressed urban burial practices, neighborhood redevelopment, open space design for teenagers, and design of therapeutic landscapes for people at risk.