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Susanne presented ‘Exploring Urban Ground: Investigating Locally Sourced Earthen Materials through Design Research in Landscape Architectural Education’ at the 2021 ECLAS conference. The paper examines material research in landscape education, asking how local earthen construction materials can be integrated into the origin stories of their local context.

Susanne teaches Landscape Media II, a course that introduces students to techniques in material testing and digital fabrication as an iterative part of the design process.

Inspired by hands-on testing of materials and relevant production processes, students developed a one-person seat or shelter. During the design process, students worked with a combination of digital and analogue fabrication techniques; drawings, mock-ups, and 1:1 prototypes.

Susanne presented ‘Hands-on Online: Challenges and Learnings from Teaching Landscape Materials and Fabrication from the Kitchen Table’ at the conference which was organised as a response to the unprecedented changes faced by the world in 2020. It documented and reflected the diverse perspectives of educators at this point in time.

The paper investigates the learnings from experimental working with materials during remote learning and presents the setting up of ‘home-fablabs’ in March 2020.

Susanne tought an elective research seminar that integrated hands-on material fabrication with technical and theoretical discussions.

The seminar introduced key concepts of material flows and examined the use of local earthen materials in contemporary landscape architecture. It used the exploration of material qualities as a tool to understand wider concepts of sustainability, urban resources, as well as fabrication and analysis technologies. Students were challenged by the theoretical, environmental, and social objections of extracting soil from the urban ground.