Dancing in the Dragon's Jaw Design Studio Course, UTenn, Knoxville

Cultivating Place: Conversations on Natural History and the Human Impulse to Garden

Chad Manley is a fellow and lecturer in the School of Landscape Architecture at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Nora Jacobs and Carlos Velasco were two of the Masters of Landscape Architecture students in Chad’s spring 2023 Landscape Architecture Design Studio entitled Dancing the Dragon’s Jaw – a deeply imagined course of study designed by Chad “inviting students on a smokey dance of space-making along a continuum of Northern and Central California landscapes," and that resulted in an "accretive semester’s long individual-collective physical and digital collage." As a culmination of the students' learning and creative term, they traveled as a group to California to “dance through its communities, meadows, and mountains, meet with fire keepers; land managers; scientists; artists; and designers, situating the journey within both the urgencies and poetic potentials of a land-on-fire.” The studio-developed ‘pyro-loci,’ worked to consider and “re-imagine an empathetic landscape architecture born of regenerative fire" – and regenerative, inclusive, and expansive learning mindsets. They learned from books, from other designers and design history, from the drawing board, but they also learned on and from the land and people for whom their design might be of greatest benefit. In our second week of back-to-school-themed episodes devoted to plant education in school and in life, the three join Cultivating Place this week to share more. Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.