Dr. Kevin Thwaites BA, DipLA(Dist), PhD
Senior Lecturer
Telephone: 0114 222 0620
Floor 12, The Arts Tower
email : k.thwaites@sheffield.ac.uk
Biography
Kevin completed his education in Landscape Architecture at Leeds in 1983 and holds the BA Degree and Graduate Diploma with Distinction in Landscape Architecture. Since then he has worked in private practice and higher education and completed his PhD in 1999. Kevin held the position of Course Leader for Undergraduate Programmes in the Landscape Architecture Department, Faculty of Health and Environment, Leeds Metropolitan University until the end of 2002. He continues to research and teach in the Faculty of Social Sciences at The University of Sheffield, where teaching and research is focused on the development of theory and practice in experiential landscape. Kevin´s teaching experience is broadly based but now focuses on design of urban open space, particularly urban landscape design theory, design processes and spatial language. Research interests include the philosophy and theory of landscape design and the relationship between space and experience and its impact on design languages and processes. More details can be found by visiting www.elprdu.com.
Research Interests
Research interests and activities focus on two main themes increasingly integrated with approaches to research led teaching.
• Theory and philosophy of landscape design and its impact on the intellectual underpinning and conceptual development of landscape design processes and spatial languages;
• Socially responsive approaches to planning and design in urban neighbourhood and other community settings, particularly how spatial and experiential dimensions converge to influence psychological health.
These general areas of interest converge in Experiential Landscape, a research stream of ICOSS (Interdisciplinary Centre Of Social Sciences) concerned with place making in urban open space settings.
Experiential Landscape. The development of an internationally significant research agenda to build a range of practical tools for urban open space analysis and design from theoretical grounding in PhD work completed in 1999. Experiential landscape develops new ways of looking at the relationship between humans and environment, integrating experiential and spatial dimensions of the outdoors, to give a deeper understanding of how humans experience urban open spaces. Original participative methodologies and site analysis tools developed through experiential landscape research have been applied and tested in a range of field based projects including work related to the rural village identity, city centre urban regeneration, the place perceptions of primary school aged children, and people with learning disabilities.
Experiential landscape provides an original and innovative contribution to international discourse in socially responsive/sustainable open space planning and design. It successfully translates theoretical principles in hollistic-environment relations into practical applications, hithereo unavailable, and in doing so bridges the disciplines pf environmental psychology and urban landscape analysis and design.
Research-led Teaching
Development of a general pepagogic strategy in module design, workshop and online formats to incorporate aspects of research agenda in experiential landscape and urban social sustainability into teaching practice. Ongoing in several national and international contexts.
Teaching Interests
Teaching activity is strongly informed by and where appropriate integrated with research developments. This has been facilitated by a Learning and Teaching Development grant which enables the development of 'The Refereed Studio'. This is a framework for design studio teaching that generates outputs from students capable of being peer reviewed and subsequently turning them in to publications/research projects. A refereed studio model is now applid and refined in LSC5030 Urban Landscape Design with updated research objectives each year. Publications arising directly from this include: Chapter 11, Thwaites and Simkins (2007) Experiential Landscape: Oxen, Routledge and Thwaites and Simkins (2008) Restorative Urban Design. Paper presentation to International Association of People-Environment Studies (IAPS) international conference 'Urban Diversities', Biosphere and Well-being' Rome, July 25 - Aug 1 2008.
Principle modules currently led include:
LSC323 Understanding Urban Regeneration by Design: This provides level three students with opportunities to develop an understanding of key principles of urban design theory with an emphasis on urban social sustainability. Students research pre-selected themes in groups and present their findings to create a bespoke digital textbook for application on a concurrent landscape design studio project (LSC307/8). The module also involves observational and analytical drawing in the style of Gordon Cullen's Townscape.
LSC306 and LSC6100 Advanced Landscape Construction Design: This module is taken by both level three and MA1 students and concentrates on small scale place making through the careful selection and integration of hard landscape materials and construction techniques. Students research precedent studies and develop design ideas for submission as a detailed 3D presentation drawing and selected construction details.
LSC5030 Urban Landscape Design: This module follows the research development agenda in Experiential Landscape and offers MLA and MA2 students opportunity to experience research collaboration by helping to develop aspects of new thinking in urban social sustainability themes.Outputs from this project continue to feature in refereed paper publication, international conference presenations and books.
Other Interests
Co-founder and core member of an international urban design collaboration called UStED (Urban Sustainability through Environmental Design) coordinated from the University of Milan. Since its inaugural symposium in 2004 a core group of UStED members have consolidated UStED as an international Alliance to further develop and exchange ideas and methodologies for the analysis and design of socially sustainable urban spaces and disseminate this globally. The UStED Alliance consists of members from Italy, France, England, Scotland, Slovenia and the USA, who compliment each other in an interdisciplinary whole (www.usted-urbandesign.org)..
Areas of Potential Research Degree Supervision
• Landscape architecture and urban design theory and philosophy
• Socially responsive design language and processes
• Phenomenological approaches to people-space relations and their application in open space design.
• Integrating teaching and research practices