The Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Department of Landscape Architecture is proud to announce this year’s recipients of the Penny White Student Projects Fund. This grant program was established by White’s family in 1976 to “help carry forward Penny’s ideal of a culture which emphasizes a close relationship between people and nature in a cohesive living environment.” (Winifred G. “Penny” White had just completed her second year in the GSD’s landscape architecture program when she died suddenly of leukemia in 1976.)
Celebrating its 40th anniversary this cycle, the Fund received many exceptional project applications from individual students and teams in design programs across the GSD. Twelve students from across disciplines will share $50,000 in funding as they pursue research.
The winning proposals were selected through a two-stage adjudication process based on originality and innovation of projects, with an eye to their contribution to pressing challenges related to the fields of urbanism, landscape, ecology. The regions of research for the selected student projects span the planet and address a range of critical conditions, technologies, and processes relevant to the advancement of the discipline of landscape architecture and contemporary urbanization today.
The following students will receive project funding for 2016:
Oliver Curtis (MDes ’17; Energy & Environments concentration) Wildfires at the Wildland-Urban Interface: Adaption and Feedback
Alberto Embriz de Salvatierra (MLA/MDes ’17; Urbanism, Landscape, Ecology MDes concentration) Reed Urbanism: Grass Infrastructures in the Floating City of Uros
Ellen Epley (MLA ’17) Lay of the Land: Visualizing the Permitting Structure for Surface Mining and Reclamation in the United States and Canada
Kent Hipp (MLA ’17) Drought in Melbourne: Surveying a Landscape of Water Scarcity
Jia Joy Hu (MLA ’17) Iceland Afforestation: Envisioning Value in a Treeless Landscape
Justin Kollar (MArch/MUP ’17) Landscape Colonization/Cultivation: Collective Memory and Politics of the Taiwan Sugar Corporation
Qi Xuan (Tony) Li (MLA ’17) Landscape of the Unreal: An Evaluation and Projection of the Hudson River’s Virtual Landscape
Sophie Maguire (MLA ’17) The State of Play: Reimagining the Role of Design in London’s Adventure Playgrounds
Kira Sargent (MLA ’17) Dynamic Climate/Dynamic Engagement: Precedents and Opportunities for Designing with Tidal Flux in a World of Rising Seas
Julia Smachylo (DDes ’19) Nature State: Managed Forest in Southern Ontario
Jonah Susskind (MLA ’17) Urban Lumber Resource Management: An Investigation of New Growth Along the American Rust Belt
Jane Zhang (MDes ’17; Urbanism, Landscape, Ecology concentration) Food as a Carrier of Cultural Memory: Mapping the Vernacular Landscapes of Stone Oak Tofu in Zhejiang, China