Danielle Choi

Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture

Contact

[email protected]

Office Location

Gund 502

CVDownload

Research Areas

Ecology
History & Theory
Infrastructure
Sensory Media
Urbanism

Landscape Architecture

Danielle Narae Choi is an Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Her research and teaching examine landscape design as a cultural practice that brings technology, infrastructure, and ecology into dialogue with public life.

Her current book project, Design Beyond Nature: Interior Landscapes and the Infrastructure of Life (under advance contract with the University of Virginia Press), investigates iconic climate-controlled landscapes of the Northern Hemisphere. In these sites, cultivated plants, engineered soils, and their attendant life‑support technologies are intertwined in cycles of growth, dependence, and decay. By design, these landscapes are not merely fragments of ecosystems under glass, but constructions expected to exceed known natural capacities—yet they repeatedly expose and frustrate illusions of human control.

Her ongoing research ranges across multiple projects, including an investigation of infrastructural breaches of continental divides in North America—watershed diversions by canal, tunnel, and pipe—and their implications for the concept of genius loci in landscape architecture. Her recent essay, “Is Landscape Labor?,” in the 2025 volume Landscape Is…! edited by Gareth Doherty and Charles Waldheim, argues that working landscapes are more than ecosystem service providers, reframing them as “worked landscapes,” collective labors that weave together ecological processes and social worlds.

Across these projects, Choi explores the everyday, incremental work of design, construction, and stewardship as material practices that redefine the ethical, professional, and aesthetic boundaries of landscape architecture in a rapidly changing climate. Her writing has been published in the Journal of Architectural Education, Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes, Harvard Design Magazine, and Fresh Water, edited by Mary Pat McGuire and Jessica Henson.

At the GSD, Choi has led studios across the core curriculum, and her seminars have addressed a wide range of topics in design, technology, and landscape history, including archival research methods for designers, remote sensing, and the migration of landscape knowledge across time and space.

Before her appointment at the GSD, Choi practiced professionally with Topotek in Berlin and Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA) in New York. As a senior associate at MVVA, she shaped the strategy and design of complex projects ranging in scale from gardens to parks to urban framework plans, leading large, multidisciplinary teams. She remains in active dialogue with design practice through contributions to professional publications such as Landscape Architecture Magazine and Vertical Urbanism, and as a design and research consultant to landscape architectural firms. Choi serves on the Harvard University Design Advisory Committee and, in 2026, was appointed a commissioner of the Boston Civic Design Commission.

Choi holds a degree in art history from the University of Chicago and an MLA from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she received the Jacob Weidenman Award for excellence in design.