Course Spotlight: Shared Ecologies and Design
2025-10-10 • Caitlin Custer
How do we teach design of the built environment, particularly as we are responsible not only for the impacts to human experiences, but also for the impacts we make on countless other species and systems? This question is central to the pedagogy of the landscape architecture program at WashU’s Sam Fox School and explored deeply in the Shared Ecologies and Design course.
“Today, design students need to be able to think creatively about a better future for many interrelated forms of life,” said Assistant Professor Seth Denizen, who taught the course in the 2024-25 academic year.
Shared Ecologies and Design is a requirement for the Master of Landscape Architecture program and a more recent addition to the requirements for undergraduate architecture students — it will also be a required course for Master of Architecture students beginning in fall 2026. Structured to balance theory and practice, the course discusses the relative newness of ecology as a field and how it has since evolved from a subfield of biology to now its own interdisciplinary area influenced by science, politics, literature, design, and more.
“Architecture is an ecological project,” said Denizen. “The built environment leaves a heavy ecological footprint in the energy and resources it requires while, at the same time, producing new ecological relationships that change the shape of the footprint, recalculate its costs, and determine its politics.” In the ongoing climate crisis, Denizen continued, designers can’t afford to ignore the ecological impact of their work. “If there was ever a time when it was possible to think about human and non-human thriving as separate questions, that time has passed.”
Work by Sam Pounders, MLA ’24
Sam Pounders, MLA ’24, described how, from the beginning, the course invited students to ask questions about how ecological thinking was developed. “It is really bound up in the philosophy of the 19th century,” she said. “Beginning our studies at this intersection helped frame the nebulous starting point of ecological thinking and nestled it into the interdisciplinary and collaborative history of design in the built environment.”
Through readings, case studies, and field trips, students in the course increase not only their scientific literacy of ecological ideas, but also their capacity to see and identify such ideas in the built environment. They also participate in design debates, which emphasize the importance of critique, persuasion, and discussion. “Making persuasive arguments about design is a skill that needs to be learned through practice,” Denizen said. “If we can’t argue over design, we can’t be designers.”
Pounders said she valued both the readings and class discussion components of the course. “That is where horizons really expand, intersections can be recognized, and dots connect,” she said. “These are moments that a cohort can return to and discuss throughout a semester or year as foundational experiences in their design thinking.”
The course also spends time delving into specific types of ecologies — community, evolutionary, landscape, disturbance, and epidemiological, to name a few. During the community ecology week, students studied the concept of a coastal keystone species in the Pacific Northwest. From there, they studied a design project in the harbor of New York City called Living Breakwater, which reintroduced oysters to flood mitigation structures. “Basically, we use case studies to test our ability to apply the ecological concepts we have learned in the first part,” Denizen said, “and then debate the design merit, ecological value, and environmental justice outcomes of the project in question.”
Now a designer at Studio Land Arts, Pounders regularly references perspective gained from Shared Ecologies. “When designing at the intersection of two materials, can we create room for non-human, sometimes even inert, lifeforms?” she asked. “Considering a detail for water, pollinators, or the enjoyment of the laborer who will be carrying out the construction provides many new possibilities. In a time when climate resilience needs all of our attention, creating space for these options can have a profound effect on the built environment.”
Denizen hopes that students walk away with a new take on how to work in the built environment. “What I want to teach students is how to completely unravel the nature-culture binary that has constrained the solution space of their discipline and led us directly to our contemporary socio-ecological crisis.”
Derek Hoeferlin, chair of the Master of Landscape Architecture program, shared that Denizen was an ideal faculty member to develop and implement the course, among other aspects of the program. “Shared Ecologies, first taught in 2022, has been fantastic and filled an ever-critical gap in delivering ecological knowledge to architecture and landscape architecture students,” Hoeferlin said. “We hope to expand it beyond the Sam Fox School and share these valuable perspectives with the larger WashU community.”