Site Matters: Design Foundations Studio is a 1st year graduate studio that uses the investigation of site as its central guiding lens. With an emphasis on critical positionality and both embodied and researched experiences of site, the studio asks students to ground themselves in their local environment to produce contextually responsive designs. The course focuses on how landscapes are known, assembled, and transformed, how landscape spatializes and materializes social and ecological relationships, and what this means for developing one’s own design process.