The identity of any landscape architecture program revolves around its studio courses, an intellectual and creative space entirely unique to the design disciplines. While studio takes the lead on technical instruction, it is also the space where students grapple with the most complicated questions inherent to making site interventions alongside mounting environmental, social, and ethical considerations. In recent decades, instructors have largely moved away from "solving" these issues through design; rather, the primary challenge of teaching is to get students to sit with ambiguity and indeterminacy, while incorporating methods and knowledge from a variety of fields in the social and ecological sciences. Elizabeth K. Meyer, FAS LA, predicted this turn in her 1997 essay "The Expanded Field of Landscape Architecture" (in Ecological Design and Planning, edited by George F. Thompson and Frederick R. Steiner, FASLA), in which she discusses the false binaries limiting approaches to the discipline, such as man and nature, public and private, or even architecture and landscape. While Meyer was essentially arguing for new ways of conceptualizing landscapes, she proved remarkably prescient in writing, "This rediscovery of the space between the binaries-the space of hybrids, relationships, and tensions-allows us to see the received histories of the modern landscape as the ideologically motivated social constructs that they are."
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