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GENERAL INFO - CENTER FOR DESIGN RESEARCH
The Landscape
Architecture Program is fortunate to have at its disposal a
research center and laboratory, the Center for Design
Research (CDR). The CDR offers both a physical space by
which students and faculty can conduct funded research, and
an intellectual center of gravity for advanced work in
landscape architecture. Established and funded for research
since 1983, the CDR's goal focuses on research to facilitate
ecologically appropriate and socially responsible planning
and design.
CDR Projects
The projects at the CDR cover a broad range of environmental
design issues. Within the CDR faculty are able to conduct
research projects supported by the AC Agricultural
Experiment Station and other agencies like the NEA, National
Park Service, U.S. Forest Service, Dept. of Parks and
Recreation, local agencies and private design firms.
The CDR focuses on three principal research areas:
ecologically responsible and sustainable design, design
which responds to and builds social community and
well-being, and personal expression through design. The
relationship between these areas are of great interest to
the CDR. Examples include a longitudinal study of the
changing landscape along the I-80 corridor from the Bay Area
to the Sierra, rural housing design, contract studies for
state and national parks, and studies of open space and
cultural landscape of the Davis campus and relevant
community.
Current projects in the CDR include Lecturer, SOE, Steve
McNeil's documentation of historical facilities in the
Angeles National Forest for the USDA Forest Service, and his
Ventura County preservation farmland study, a project
managed by the California Coastal Conservancy. A CDR project
by Robert Thayer aims to develop ways of integrating the
production of solar photovoltaic energy into the urban built
landscape, and is being conducted in conjunction with the
California Energy Commission. Mark Francis is the faculty
advisor for the UC Davis Medical Center Urban Wildlife
Preserve Participatory Planning and Design Project which
involves hospital staff, the community and a neighborhood
school in the planning process for an open space preserve on
the Medical Center campus.
Other CDR Functions
Hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of research grants
have been performed via the CDR, and the CDR also organizes
research symposia and colloquia which have resulted in
widely distributed monographs and research reports. The CDR
is also the "nerve center" for faculty dissemination of
research
publications, which
are kept current in stock and sold upon request. As the
functioning research laboratory of the Landscape
Architecture Program, the CDR is also the means by which and
the location for students to be hired as research
assistants, thereby helping to diffuse faculty research into
the undergraduate educational experience.
Questions? Please contact Shannon
Tanguay.