Becoming Undisciplined: Scrappy Methods for Landscape Architecture

October 6, 2026 6:15 PM – 8:00 PM

Higgins Hall, HHN 304, 61 St. James Place, Brooklyn 11238

Register
A woman with long dark hair and round, pink glasses wears a gray sweater as she sits on steps next to a man who has wavy brown hair and a light beard. He is dressed in a black jacket and smiles at the camera. The background features a minimalist, industrial-style interior with concrete walls.

What resources are available for reimagining design education today? Pedagogies for Anti-Disciplinary Design Education (Routledge, 2026) mobilizes teaching experiments by authors from twelve global institutions who seek to transcend disciplinary boundaries in design education. This panel – part of an international series of discussions emerging from the book – will focus on the chapter by Pratt’s Mark Heller and Mariel Collard Arias, “Design Before Discipline: Scrappy Methods for a Contemporary Landscape Architecture Education,” which links the founding of  Pratt’s Master of Landscape Architecture with the Institute’s experimental beginnings to explore how design, when physically practiced and literally taken into our own hands, can renegotiate the limits of bureaucracy, clients, budgets, and disciplinary rules.

David Brown, AIA, Studio Practice Leader and Principal at HKS New York, along with Pratt graduate architecture professor MJ Sieira and MLA graduate student Anjali Britto, will discuss Heller and Arias’s chapter and specific concepts from Pedagogies for Anti-Disciplinary Design Education.

Panel

Mariel Collard Arias (Pratt MLA) – presenter
Mark Heller (Pratt MLA) – presenter
M J Sieira (Pratt Architecture)– moderator
David Brown (HKS) – respondent 
Anjali Britto (Pratt MLA) – respondent
Mitesh Dixit, Fedah Taqi, James Westcott – editors, Pedagogies for Anti-Disciplinary Design Education

Mark Heller is a computational designer and assistant professor of landscape architecture at Pratt Institute. He builds tools for urban and landscape analysis by integrating GIS into creative coding and parametric scripting environments.

Mariel Collard Arias is a Mexican architect and an Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at Pratt Institute. Her work investigates and activates ancestral practices, tools, and materials that build landscape competence and cultivate unmediated relationships with the living world.

A textured red background serves as the cover for a book titled "Pedagogies." The title is vertically positioned in white, with the subtitle "for Anti-Disciplinary Design Education" prominently displayed. The book is edited by Mitesh Dixit, Fedah Taqi, and James Westcott, whose names are listed near the bottom of the cover. The publisher's name, Routledge, is also visible.
A collection of aging catalogues from the Pratt Institute, stacked and slightly overlapping. The catalogues vary in size and color, primarily featuring muted hues of gray with some fading and tearing along the edges. Text on the covers includes "CATALOGUE" and "PRATT INSTITUTE," along with respective years, such as "1891-92." The background is a light surface, and there are remnants of original bindings visible.