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 and a licensed landscape architect. Her research examines landscape design as a cultural practice that synthesizes broader concerns of science, technology, and infrastructure.

Choi’s current research is an environmental study of 20th-century interior landscapes. A subset of public projects were volatile sites of negotiation between plant vitality and human comfort; colonial botany and situated traditional knowledge; new aesthetic agendas and entrenched urban crisis. Ongoing research investigates infrastructural breaches of continental divides in North America and their implications for the concept of genius loci in landscape architecture.

Choi’s writing has been published in the Journal of Architectural Education, Harvard Design Magazine, Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes, Landscape Architecture Magazine, and in the volume Fresh Water, edited by Mary Pat McGuire and Jessica Henson. A forthcoming essay, Landscape is. . . Labor will appear in the volume Landscape Is. . .!, edited by Gareth Doherty and Charles Waldheim.

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 led the strategy and design of complex projects ranging in scale from gardens to parks to urban framework plans, leading large, multi-disciplinary teams. Choi draws upon this experience to examine the realms of knowledge, social relations, and labor required to produce (and that are produced by) living landscapes.

Choi holds a degree in art history from the University of Chicago and a Master in Landscape Architecture degree from the GSD, where she received the Jacob Weidenman award for excellence in design.