The Harvard University Graduate School of Design’s Department of Landscape Architecture has announced this year’s recipients of the Penny White Project 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.)
Eleven projects have been announced in honor of the fund’s 40th anniversary. 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 2017:
Madeleine Aronson (MLA ’18): Wild Mushroom Economies and Landscape Disturbance: Leveraging the Social and Ecological Potential of Wild Mushrooms in the Pacific Northwest
Tami Banh (MArch/MLA ’18): Engineered Nature: Studying the History of Ecological Intensification in Lower Mekong Basin through Critical Cartography
Michelle Benoit and Matthew Wong (both MLA ’18): Alternate Futures
Emily Drury (MLA ’18): Representing Representation: The Voting District & Redistricting as Grounded Site of Inquiry
Gideon Finck (MLA ’18): Untrammeled by Design
Yousef Hussein (MArch ’18): Kuwait’s Urban Landscape: The Aerial View of Modernist Colonial Planning
Charlotte Leib (MLA ’18) Surveying Sites Unseen: Trees, Representation, and Power in the 19th Century American Preservation and Conservation Movement
Alison Malouf (MLA ’18) Great Expectations: Designing for Privacy in the Smart City
Stacy Passmore (MLA ’18): From Drain Age to Retain Age: The Beaver’s Tale of Arid Landscapes: An Illustrated Catalogue
Estello Raganit (MLA ’19): Queering Landscapes: Cruising, Sexual Performance, and Social Liberation in Dongdan Park, Beijing, China
Phia Sennett (MLA ’19) Piscary: Impressions of Fishing Gear in the Salish Sea