Building Skills That Last
At UC Davis, students design, build and see their work become part of the campus and community. Oversized bright yellow Adirondack chairs invite people to sit and stay awhile. Three architectural follies have become a popular spot to lounge on campus, while three more stand out in downtown Davis, built in partnership with the city.
A studio course within the landscape architecture and environmental design program offers students the experience to measure, cut, assemble, troubleshoot and adapt as they turn their sketches into physical spaces and structures. During that course, they develop the technical, construction, teamwork and problem-solving skills that are essential to the profession.
An endowment kick-started by Marq Truscott and his wife Rachel Ragatz Truscott, who earned a landscape architecture degree from UC Davis, helps fund the materials that make these projects possible.
Truscott has been a lecturer of landscape architecture at UC Davis for 30 years and was president of RQ Studio, a local land development and design firm. With decades of experience in the profession, he knows the value of real-world experience. And he sees what happens when students get the chance to do the work themselves; they become more confident, capable and ready to lead a project.
“Would I hire them? Yeah. And the owners of other firms are hiring students from UC Davis, and they’re enjoying the technical aptitude that these students are coming out of school with when they’re comparing them to other schools in California,” said Truscott. “The students are learning how to use real tools that contractors use, and how to build with them. They’re getting real world, hands-on experience to bring their concepts to reality.”
The endowment has recently been renamed to honor the late Kevin Perry, a UC Davis landscape architecture graduate and former lecturer who was a passionate champion of design-build education. His commitment to giving students this kind of experience lives on through the endowment.
The projects may become chairs, follies, gazebos or bike racks, but the experience stays with the students. They graduate with the confidence to lead a project, the skills to build it and an edge when they enter the workplace.
