Kaja Tally-Schumacher

Kaja Tally-Schumacher is an Assistant Professor of Environmental History at the Graduate School of Design. Her primary area of expertise is the archaeology and analysis of designed landscapes and ancient environments in the ancient Roman world from ca. 2^nd c. BCE to 4^th c. CE across Western Eurasia and Northern Africa, ranging from urban plantings to suburban and rural gardens. More broadly, her research interests include ancient Mediterranean gardens and landscapes, digital reconstructions and visualization, comparative environmental history, and issues pertaining to sustainability, resiliency, and climate mitigation in cultural heritage sites.

She currently serves as the Assistant Director of the joint Università di Bologna, Graduate School of Design, and Cornell University Casa della Regina Carolina (CRC) Project at Pompeii, where she and her team are excavating one of the largest urban gardens in the ancient city. Pompeii is central to any account of Roman households and daily life in ancient times. This study focuses on the so-called Casa della Regina Carolina (VIII 3.14 and VIII 3.15), a house and garden that was cleared of volcanic ash in the early 19th century but never excavated with modern scientific methods. While Pompeii is famous for revealing details of daily life, frozen in time by the eruption, those of this house have been largely forgotten, with few records remaining of what the archaeologists first found.

The CRC team is the first to conduct stratigraphic excavation of the garden and house since its discovery in the nineteenth century. In 2018–2023, the team used ground-penetrating radar (GPR) to locate buried remains; documented standing architecture and topography via LiDAR and Total Station; excavated over 130 m2 of the garden and have been able to reconstruct aspects of the ancient environment via various sampling methods. Excavated and documented garden features include multiple planting pots, root cavities, pathways, built architecture (including two shrines and a probable triclinium), and wall paintings. As a result, the team has now recorded and is reconstructing much of the first-century CE garden in CAD, Rhino, and Unity, and has spatially recorded the findspots of all artifacts for GIS analysis.

Her long-term research goals are rooted in investigating human-landscape interactions and in challenging the boundaries of the canon. In “Wet Feet” (2023) she explores changing corporeal perceptions of climate as depicted and described in visual and literary ecological calendars created during the period of the Roman Climate Optimum (roughly 200 BCE to 150 CE), when the climate was unusually stable, moist, and warm, and as well as those constructed in the subsequent climatologically unstable centuries. This analysis articulates the rich archival potential of late Roman and Antique visual and textual material culture as a source of climatological data.

Tally-Schumacher’s research has also focused on the development and conceptualization of ornamental plantings and gardens in the Roman period. She first examined this theme in “Through the Picture Plane” (2016 and 2017), focusing on the creation of a new densely-planted ornamental garden type that arose in the second half of the first century BCE, as exemplified in the Garden Room wall paintings from Livia’s villa at Prima Porta. Utilizing a greenscreen, generating a planting plan based on the painted garden, and populating the painting and room with strollers, viewers, and diners, illustrates the close connection between real and painted gardens, suggesting a close relationship between designers and painters in antiquity. A Cultural History of Plants in Antiquity (2022), which features her subsequent work on the conceptualization of these new ornamental green spaces as widowed, unmarried, and useless, won the Daniel F. Austin Award from The Society for Economic Botany and was a Finalist of the Prose Award in the Humanities Reference Category.

Tally-Schumacher’s current book project, Gardeners, Plants, and Soils of the Roman World, investigates an overlooked group of practitioners: landscape designers and gardeners of various social classes in the period of the “Roman Climate Optimum,” a period characterized by an unusually stable, moist, and warm climate. This period was marked by a rapid blossoming of a new cross-Mediterranean plant trade, burgeoning horticultural innovation, and, as a result, the rise of a new designer and gardener class. The project is interdisciplinary, drawing on traditional archives, such as representations of gardens, textual descriptions of gardeners and gardens, and archaeological evidence from excavated gardens. She also integrates innovative work on plant bio-intelligence, human-object entanglements, diachronic case studies (such as US Antebellum records of similar gardeners in neoclassical plantation gardens), and field interviews with present-day practitioners to reconstruct historical gardener lives. This project thus not only contributes to our understanding of the entanglement between forced labor, cultivation, and climate change in the Roman world, but also engages with comparative discourse on forced labor and landscape studies in the US.

She holds an MA with Distinction in Ancient Art History and completed her doctoral work with leading landscape historians, Claudia Lazzaro and Kathryn L. Gleason, at Cornell University. Dr. Tally-Schumacher’s research has been supported by predoctoral and postdoctoral fellowships at Dumbarton Oaks, at the University of Pennsylvania, and at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University. Dr. Tally-Schumacher’s commitment to scholastic excellence in the classroom is exemplified by her two Distinguished Teaching awards, from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst (2012), and Cornell University (2017).

Translations and Negotiations: The Roman Landscape in the Modern World

This course investigates the myriad ways ancient Roman place-making, visual culture, and thought have been evoked, utilized, weaponized, and translated in North American thought, design, and visual history. Our investigation juxtaposes well-established connections between White Supremacy and the Classical Past with often overlooked Indigenous and Black engagement with classical forms. At the heart of our investigation are concepts of agency, ownership, and power, i.e. who shapes the land and who owns the classical forms?

Topics explored include:
The way Indigenous and Black artists, thinkers, and designers have engaged with and translated classical visual practices and concepts (such as Edmonia Lewis and Kent Monkman); Neoclassicism and White Supremacy (i.e. who owns the classical past in public parks?, and the question of Robert E. Lee/Marcus Aurelius); the entanglement between working the land and enslavement and the parallels and divergences between Roman and New World enslavement; the influence of Roman landscape design and horticulture on later American landscapes and gardens; the legacy of Roman surveying methods and centuriation in the mapping of the US; imperialism and the construction of the “other” (e.g. Neoclassical portrayals of Indigenous figures in civic spaces in the guise of ancient Mediterranean barbarians); and the translation and adoption of ancient Mediterranean and Roman visual culture in American cemeteries (including a class visit to Mount Auburn Cemetery).

The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 3rd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. As this course meets on Tuesday, the first meeting of this course will be on Tuesday, September 10th. It will meet regularly thereafter. 

Plants of Ritual: Creating a Spiritual Connection to the Designed Landscape

The seminar aims to investigate and catalog plants that have a spiritual/emotional value to the public and individuals in the designed landscape. The seminar’s goal is to structure a collection and an archive of plants used during rituals and ceremonies in different cultures and beliefs. Moving from the four sacred medicines for the Native American people (tobacco, sweetgrass, sage, and cedar) to boneset for African-American People or pomegranates and citrons in Jewish traditions to plants that typify the Christian tradition (lilies for the Virgin Mary and thorny vines as an icon of the crucifixion, for example), we’ll unveil a more intimate and ritualistic relationship between human beings and nature in everyday life. This can inform and expand emotional connections between culture and landscape architecture. The seminar is divided into sections; each focused on the role of these plants during life cycle ceremonies such as birth, marriage, and death and the religious and pagan cycle of festivals.

The narrative about each plant will be combined with an illustrated herbarium and focused interviews with representatives of each spiritual community. In this plant exploration, a crucial role is also given to the common name of a plant that often assumes a cultural and ritual meaning instead of a purely botanical one. This type of nomenclature also builds connections between spiritual value and the designed landscape. This collection aims to have an impact in the design fields: in the past, plant palettes were chosen for visual beauty or screening, then more recently, plants also started to be selected for their ecological value. Through this atlas, we extend the criteria for how plants are chosen by introducing a spiritual connection to designed landscapes.

The goal is to have a more cultural reading of the landscape and to offer opportunities to the different communities to live in an environment that represents the spiritual values of the settled communities, their collective memory and identity, their aspiration, and their needs for the designed landscape to contain more of their emotional approach to plants and the intimate living environment.

North American Seacoasts and Landscapes: Discovery Period to the Present

Selected topics in the history of the North American coastal zone, including the seashore as wilderness, as industrial site, as area of recreation, and as artistic subject; the shape of coastal landscape for conflicting uses over time; and the perception of the seashore as marginal zone in literature, photography, painting, film, television, and advertising.

Note: Offered jointly with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences as VES 166.
Prerequisites: GSD 4105 and GSD 4303, or permission of the instructor

Note that this course follows the FAS academic calendar. See the FAS calendar for information on the first day of classes. 

Histories of Landscape Architecture I: Textuality and the Practice of Landscape Architecture

This course introduces students to a number of significant topoi or loci in the histories of landscape architecture. In general terms, it takes the form of a conspectus, a survey of the field, but one in which the underlying nature (made and found), boundaries, contours, and texture of this field—in fact several disparate fields—is made the object of close scrutiny. We will define landscape architecture as we survey it. In pursuing an intermittent chronological narrative, the lectures will place site-specific emphasis on a number of cognate disciplines (hydrology, forestry, geology, agronomy, geography, hunting, inter alia), in the context of endemic and transplanted visual and textual traditions. While inspecting the grounds of villas, cloisters gardens, parks, and cities, we will be attentive to surrounding formations of discourse (the pastoral, the picturesque, the emblematic, the Adamic and Edenic) that have and continue to imbue them with meaning. 

The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 3rd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. As this course meets on Monday, the first meeting of this course will be on Tuesday, September 3rd. It will meet regularly thereafter. 

Studies of the Built North American Environment: since 1580

North America as an evolving visual environment is analyzed as a systems concatenation involving such constituent elements as farms, small towns, shopping malls, highways, suburbs, and as depicted in fiction, poetry, cartography, television, cinema, and advertising and cybernetic simulation.

Note that this course follows the FAS academic calendar. See the FAS calendar for information on the first day of classes. 

FORESTS: Histories and Future Narratives

From a distance, all forests appear to be remarkably similar: they are ecosystems characterized by the dominance of trees, they provide habitat for species of flora and fauna, they provide shelter and resources to humans, and they are key agents in climate mitigation and adaptation. Yet, at the same time, they are all unique, and their distinctiveness is what will draw our attention to them as the subject of study. More specifically, we will examine case examples of designed forests, those that were introduced into a site with intention. The seminar will be structured in three parts. The first one, “Understanding Forests” will explore basic concepts that explain how forests work, such as sprouting and evolutionary and ecological succession. The second one, “Forest Legacies,” will explore the evolving role of forests in the history of designed landscapes and the overlap between forestry and design. Finally, we will explore contemporary works of regeneration and conservation, from small urban forests to transcontinental mega forests. Students will examine case examples of their choice and explore through text and image the necessary multivalence and multi-scalarity of these landscapes in the future. A central theme of analysis will be how the encounter of new sciences and technology, when combined with market economies (or the resistance against them), drives shifts in forest ecology and design.

The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 3rd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. As this course meets on Monday, the first meeting of this course will be on Tuesday, September 3rd. It will meet regularly thereafter. 

Why Not Cultural Systems? Expanding Our Value System Beyond Nature and Ecology

How do cultural landscapes shape our shared public memory? How do our collective planning, design and stewardship decisions affect how we assign value and manage change? Once a project is built, how do we measure success?

In an attempt to address these challenges, what role can – and should — Landscape Architecture play as collaborative participants in a national reckoning? How can the discipline prepare themselves to develop the necessary awareness and tools to address historical (and purposeful) erasure, memorials of the past, antiquated rigidity of historic government standards — and – in response, how can we commemorate the past in our shared public realm in our cities, parks, campuses (academic, cultural), and elsewhere – by amplifying community voices?  

This seminar will examine the planning, design and stewardship opportunities — and constraints — frequently encountered when dealing with cultural landscapes. In addition to addressing foundational principles, this seminar will demonstrate how bridging the artificial, often segmented divides between both design and historic preservation as well as nature (accelerated by climate change resiliency) and culture can result in an expanded, holistic, and more nuanced design interventions.

Specifically, this seminar will address the issues, and identify the tools and strategies surrounding the research, analysis. planning, treatment, and management of cultural landscapes from surgical design interventions to a landscape that was (and can still be) associated with important people, cultural lifeways, or past events. Cultural landscapes are a palimpsest to be read, that can be both messy and complicated, and rich in a narrative that is waiting to be revealed.

Methodologies for historic research, tools for documenting existing conditions, and strategies for evaluating and analyzing cultural landscapes will be reviewed and tested. In addition, considerations and tools for assigning value, and the myriad and interrelated issues surrounding the level of design intervention, carrying capacity for change, and prescriptions for management and interpretation will also be debated. This work will be buttressed with case studies, supplemented with a small number of local site visits, and two required student presentations.

Finally, a diversity of planning, design and stewardship challenges will be addressed. This includes: physical and financial limitations for essential research; how we assess and assign significance; the value we place on context (both physical and historical); the quest for authenticity and why this is an underutilized tool in our design kits; antiquity as an asset (also known as weathering); the need to determine a landscape’s carrying capacity for change; and, the recognition of a cultural landscape's palimpsest (historic layers).  Integral to this work, the necessity for communications strategies for messaging and meaningful public engagement will be a key consideration.

 

The Idea of Environment

The environment is the milieu in which designers and planners operate. It is a messy world of facts, meanings, relations, and actions that calls them to intervene—that is, to make a plan, solve a problem, create a product, or strategize a process. They use various measures to assess and project their interventions from beauty and efficiency to systems and sustainability. Today, increasing volatility and uncertainty of the environment, however, alongside a growing sense and presence of crises and disasters, compels us to reconsider how we have imaged and imagined, defended and critiqued, planned and designed the environment. The class will explore how and what new approaches to representation, visualization, and measurement might lead to different relations in a changing world.  

This class is a seminar focused on reading and discussion. Course participants will be required to submit weekly reading responses, to contribute to discussions online and in class, and to develop an original research and/or design project over the course of the semester.

Theories of Landscape as Urbanism

This course introduces contemporary theories of landscape as a medium of urbanism and product of urbanization. The course surveys sites and subjects, texts and topics describing landscape’s embeddedness in processes of urbanization as well as economic transformations informing the shape of the city. The course introduces students to landscape as a form of cultural production, as a mode of human subjectivity, as a medium of design, as a profession, and as an academic discipline. Through lectures, discussions, readings, and case study projects, students will be introduced to landscape through the lenses of capital, labor, material, subject, and environment. The first half of the course revisits the origins of landscape in response to the societal and environmental challenges of industrialization and the attendant transformations in industrial economy shaping the modern metropolis. The second half of the course repositions recent discourse on landscape as urbanism in relation to the economic and territorial transformations associated with ongoing urbanization at the planetary scale.
 
The first quarter of the course introduces the origins of landscape as a genre of painting and the invention of the ‘new art’ of landscape architecture as responses to urbanization and their attendant social, economic, and cultural transformations. This portion of the course describes the material and cultural contexts in which landscape was conceived as well as the sites and subjects it invoked. The second quarter of the course describes the emergence of city planning from within landscape architecture and the subsequent impoverishment of the field in the absence of its urban contents. This portion of the course introduces the aspirations and implications of ecologically informed regional planning in the 20thcentury, as well as the ongoing ideological effects of that agenda in the context of neoliberalism.
 
The third quarter of the course introduces the discourse and practices of landscape urbanism over the past two decades. This portion of the course surveys the discursive and projective potentials of an ecological urbanism, as distinct from those of ecological planning, and speculates on the recent formulation of projective ecologies, among other discursive formations shaping the field. The final quarter of the course follows the transition from region to territory, and from regional urbanization to planetary urbanization. This portion of the course describes landscape’s role as a medium of cultural production and critical revelation in relation to the increased scale and scope of anthropogenic impacts across the planet.
 
Course readings and supplementary multimedia materials are made available for asynchronous review via Canvas. The course consists of bi-weekly lectures and an additional discussion session. Students are invited to contribute to discussions, prepare brief response papers, and complete a design research dossier on a topic attendant to the course content at the end of the term. The course is required for candidates in the Master in Landscape Architecture Program, is recommended for candidates in the Ecologies domain of the Master in Design Studies Program, and invites elective students from all programs and departments of the School.

The first day of classes, Tuesday, September 3rd, is held as a MONDAY schedule at the GSD. As this course meets on Tuesday, the first meeting of this course will be on Thursday, September 5th. It will meet regularly thereafter.