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University of Torontos Fionn Byrne to join GSD as 20152016 Kiley Fellow

Fionn Byrne is the recipient of the 2015–2016 Daniel Urban Kiley Teaching Fellowship in Landscape Architecture and will join the GSD faculty for the 2015–2016 academic year as a lecturer in landscape architecture. Byrne comes to the GSD from the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto and the University of Waterloo School of Architecture in Cambridge, Ontario, where he has been a full-time instructor.

Launched in late 2011, the GSD’s Daniel Urban Kiley Teaching Fellowship is awarded competitively on an annual basis, and is intended to recognize and foster emerging design educators whose work embodies the potential for landscape as a medium of design in the public realm. Previous fellows include Sergio Lopez-Pineiro, Zaneta Hong, and Rosetta Elkin.

As the 2015–2016 Kiley Fellow, Byrne will continue his research on the moral underpinnings of contemporary landscape architecture. Through establishing the rise of the environmental movement as an antithesis to military development, his research questions the ability to deploy ecology as a moral and just science to circumvent politics. Byrne previously served as an associate at Lateral Office and has worked with the Planning Group at HOK, both in Toronto.

The Daniel Urban Kiley Teaching Fellowship is named after Daniel Urban Kiley (1912–2004), an influential landscape architect whose notable projects include the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial in St. Louis, the Art Institute of Chicago’s South Garden, and Benjamin Banneker Park in Washington, D.C. He studied landscape architecture at the GSD in the 1930s.