VIRTUAL MADRID FOCUS ON PEDAGOGY
Abstract
Synthetic Biocrusts is a new design research studio for undergraduate students that develops methods of thinking and working across the art-science boundary, with a focus on microscopic materials as an edge condition for landscape design and pedagogy. The studio examines this interface through artistic expressions of thinness, scientific research and science communication, and speculative experiential engagement with biological soil crusts. This talk presents an original studio course taught in Spring 2026, discussing curriculum development, student work, and lessons learned. The studio asked students to design at the micro-scale, focusing on the desert’s “living skin:” biological soil crust — a subject that is ecologically critical yet invisible in normative landscape practice. Sited within the UG3 “Extreme Landscapes” cluster, the studio’s focus on arid environments offered productive distance from the central Ohio landscapes students know, defamiliarizing their assumptions about scale, materiality, and what counts as a design subject. Students were positioned as collaborators with scientists, land managers, and restoration ecologists at the Canyonlands Research Center in southeast Utah, developing scientifically rigorous and aesthetically engaging artifacts for science communication alongside expressive artistic studies and field sketches. This partnership grounded the studio in real-world challenges while building the cross-disciplinary fluency increasingly essential to landscape practice. Through this curriculum, we found that students developed tools for inter/trans-disciplinary thinking and communication that extend well beyond this specific subject — equipping them to engage urban and rural landscape challenges with deepened attention to the importance and beauty of the microscopic.
Originally from the Netherlands, Paula Meijerink is a landscape architect, and associate professor at The Ohio State University. Her current research on the materiality of landscape includes the introduction of organic life into hostile, human-altered environments within the context of human experience. Her practice with WANTED landscape llc includes landscape architectural design for the McCord Museum’s ephemeral Forêt Urbaine/Urban Forest and the Kirkland Medical Center, both in Montreal.
Theodore Teichman is the 2025-2026 MidLL Research Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor at the Knowlton School of Architecture. Their research engages the creative and transformative potential of degraded landscapes and the beings therein. Using phenomenological methods for critical landscape practices, their research embraces co-creation and counter-narration with the “monstrous” places, materials, and non-humans to develop arts of dwelling in damaged worlds. Through place-based pedagogy, Teichman broadens the definition and vantage of “degraded” sites–from the Highlands of Iceland to the biotech office parks of Hyderabad–in order to empower a more nuanced and resilient design response.