Artemisia Landscape Design

Landscape architecture education

Since 2006 our lead designer, Kristin Faurest, has taught and directed design studios for third- and fourth-year landscape architecture students from more than 30 countries at several European institutions of higher learning. She is an invited lecturer at Budapest Corvinus University, Faculty of Landscape Architecture, Department of Garden and Open Space Design, and has taught her course, Community-Supported Green Spaces, at the following additional institutions to date:

• Budapest Technical University, Department of Architecture, Saint Joseph Collegium community design program
• Budapest Technical University, Department of Urban Planning
• Mendel University, Faculty of Horticulture, Department of Landscape Architecture, Lednice, Czech Republic
• International Master's of Landscape Architecture Program (IMLA), Nürtingen-Geislingen University, Germany
• Weihenstephan-Triesdorf University of Applied Sciences, Freising, Germany
• Moholy-Nagy University of Arts and Design, Budapest

The course is based on these questions:

• How can we as designers contribute to social justice and sustainability in our urban communities?
• How can we use our skills and knowledge as designers to work with communities to create interactive, vibrant green spaces that truly meet the criteria of being the "living room of the city"?
• How can we design common spaces in a way that makes the people who use them feel a sense of ownership and responsibility for them?

In the first half of the course we focus on small-scale, volunteer or resident-managed shared urban green spaces such as community gardens. In the second half we focus on public space design.

Lectures include:

• Community gardens as an urban rehabilitation tool
• Social justice in landscape architecture
• Defensible spaces
• Green space as a fundamental human right
• Healing gardens
• Participatory design methods
• The elements of a great public space
• Planning methods for public spaces
• How to evaluate and revitalize a public space

Each semester students participate in a charrette focused on designing a community green space, for example:

• Urban greenway proposal for Rakos Creek, District X., Budapest (fall 2011, images below)

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• Creation of a greenway concept for the Mures River, Targu Mures, Romania

Student work from international workshop in Romania, summer 2011
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• Reimagining People's Park, a major urban park in Budapest (fall 2010). See here for an example of student work (PDF, 3.5Mbyte).
• Researching park usage in Nehru Park to help shape its redesign (spring 2009)
• Conducting community design workshops for the Roma Parliament buildings and courtyard, in cooperation with architecture students from the Saint Joseph Studio Collegium of the Budapest Technical University (spring 2009)

Two student designs for the Roma Parliament courtyard, May 2009
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Students from the architecture and landscape architecture faculties present their work.

• Working with 22 different urban and rural communities to design school gardens, leisure parks and other sites as part of the Environmental Partnership for Sustainable Development's small grants program (fall 2009)

Student designs for two rural communities receiving grants funds from the
Environmental Partnership for Sustainable Development
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• Designing gardens for schools and residential blocks in cooperation with grant recipients of the GreenLeaf grants program (Fall 2007).
• Developing a therapeutic garden for the Peto Institute, which provides education and therapy for children and teenagers with physical disabilities resulting from conditions such as cerebral palsy or other damage to the central nervous system. The garden is designed to be completely wheelchair accessible, but its real objective is not to provide a place for wheelchairs, but instead to provide physical challenges for the children who live at the institute, to help them meet the goals of the therapy and achieve greater independence in their daily lives. (Spring 2010)

Student designs for the Petõ Institute therapeutic garden
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• Developing designs for Civitan International's facility in Budapest. The facility is a plant nursery that employs mildly mentally-retarded residents of a nearby home. The students were Mexicans on an exchange program at Corvinus University, spring 2012.

A student proposal for Civitan International's facility
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