News

GSD at Society of Architectural Historians conference

Charles Waldheim, John E. Irving Professor of Landscape Architecture and Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, will deliver the keynote address at this year’s Society of Architectural Historians conference.

The talk, titled “Reading Chicago’s Landscape as Urbanism,” will address “the origin of the profession of landscape architecture in the 19th century as a ‘new art’ charged with reconciling the design of the industrial city with its ecological and social functions.” The main body of the talk situates recent claims for the landscape architect as the urbanist of our age with a particular focus on recent work in Chicago, and describes landscape as a medium of design for contemporary Chicago through comparison with recent projects in New York and Toronto.

In addtion to Waldheim’s keynote, lecturers Susan Nigra Snyder and George Thomas, co-coordinators of the Master in Design Studies (MDes) program in Critical Conservation, will chair a session titled “21st Century Critical Conservation: Re-Thinking the Status Quo.” As part of the session, Natalia Escobar Castrillon (MDes ’13, PhD ’18) and José María Ortiz Cotro (MDes ’13) will present papers.