Once you climb the steps to Ag Hall, head to the basement and take a peek in the loft of Room 25. At well-worn tables in little nooks, you”ll see students with headphones and baseball caps bent over their work in concentration. In one corner, students huddle around professor Bill Tishler and landscape architect Shawn Kelly as they offer suggestions on drainage, lighting and traffic control.

Welcome to Landscape Architecture 551, the capstone class for landscape architecture majors. The course brings together students” previous courses and puts them into practice. “Our students are good generalists,” Tishler says. “They know a lot about the natural and physical sciences.”

Students put that science to work
In LA 551, where Tishler and Kelly help them integrate landscape with art and design. Tishler”s interest in historic preservation and “vernacular” (as opposed to “elite”) architecture shows students what a difference they can make with public places and aging downtowns. Kelly”s background in perception helps him teach students how just changing a few vertical elements of design can make people want to linger in one spot for an afternoon.

A little art, a little math
Art and design aren”t the only talents landscape architecture taps. Landscape architects must do the math involved in designing irrigation, drainage and lighting systems. They make decisions about public health and safety. Beyond that, landscape architects have a mission to protect the environment. “With landscape architecture, sustainability is the name of the game,” says Kelly.

During the year-long course, each student plans a project with a “client” and writes a report on the project. Students combine input from the client with their own ideas. Clients have no obligation to use the student”s plans, but many incorporate elements of the student plans into their projects.

Designing a golf course
Steve Gibson worked with professionals at Marshall Erdman and Associates to find the best use for a 3,000-acre parcel near Spring Green. The land is mostly undeveloped, save for a few rental homes. “I”m trying to find the best use for the property so that people can take advantage of the natural beauty of the site and also learn something about ecology and natural processes,” he said. To do that, he had to understand human activity and its impacts on natural and cultural systems, and then create a design to minimize those impacts. His plan includes planting orchards, providing hiking paths, restoring old buildings and building a conference center for the Marshall Erdman Academy for Sustainable Design.

Environmental restoration
While Gibson worked on undeveloped land, Cindy Leinss developed a new plan for University Lake School in Hartland. The area is hilly, with some slopes as steep as 30 percent. The current 170-acre campus has some vehicle and pedestrian routing problems. The school needed help siting and designing new athletic fields. In addition, a long-neglected corner of the campus has been designated as an environmental corridor. Leinss had already done some environmental restoration work, so the project seemed like a good fit.

And it was. Several architects had already tried new designs, but Leinss”s work on site development solved problems that others had failed to correct, Tishler explains.

“The most interesting part of the project is how enthusiastic people at the school are to take my suggestions and implement them,” Leinss said.

Ian Morris, who”s revitalizing the downtown of Twin Lakes, Wis., also appreciates the interest the community showed in his project. Before he made a single sketch, Morris spent many hours in the community, listening to residents and taking a preliminary survey. He heard everything from “Don”t touch our town” to “Burn it all down.”

“I want to create a sense of place people will remember,” Morris said. To that end, he wants to use what”s now a mostly paved park as an entry point. “We don”t need to pave the world,” he said. His plan would turn the parking lot into a series of circles, or nodes, with a symbolic lighthouse in the center. Morris”s plan also accents historic structures and replaces towering streetlights with human-scale lights and signs.

Renovating a playground
Catherine Robbins wants to renovate the playground at the UW-Madison Children”s Hospital. The current playground is not accessible for children with handicaps, and has fallen into disrepair. Like other students, Robbins learned not only about design, but also about the delicate art of negotiation. She dealt with several public agencies: the State of Wisconsin, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Nursing School and the Medical School.

On the other hand, Eric Rasmussen has just one client, who shares Rasmussen”s passion for golf and interest in biological diversity. Rasmussen wants to turn a dilapidated 9-hole golf course into a championship 18-hole course with an accompanying par 3 course and teaching center.

The turtle problem
There”s just one problem: the turtles.

An endangered species, the Blanding”s turtle, already lives on the site. Rasmussen”s work involved finding travel routes for turtle nesting, preserving its current habitat and nesting sites, creating new habitat and reducing the number of road crossings turtles must make to reach their nesting sites. Eventually, he developed a plan that would lead turtles to lower ground through a culvert system to keep them off the roads altogether.

“This is what we”re being trained to do,” Rasmussen said. “We have to take care of everything,”

Taking care of everything has its rewards. As graduation neared Gibson was looking at three job offers. Other students used their projects as portfolio pieces at an annual landscape architecture job conference.

The skills demonstrated by the capstone projects are highly marketable. Kelly put it to the students this way: “If you were marketing what you”re doing to paying clients, you”d be making thousands of dollars.” Fees for landscape architects in the Madison area average around $85 per hour.

But while the financial rewards may come soon after graduation, no waiting is required for the satisfaction of putting hard-won skills to practical use.

“When you can do your own thing and make something come to life like this, it”s really inspiring and motivating,” points out Steve Gibson.

(This story first appeared in the CALS 2000-2001 Science Report.)