Frederick Law Olmsted Lecture

Gary Hilderbrand “Writing on the Surface of the Earth”

A black-and-white photograph of a cyclist riding through an urban plaza, captured with motion blur. Strong sunlight casts a large, sharply defined shadow of the bicycle and rider across the paved ground.
Photo: Millicent Harvey
Event Location

Piper Auditorium

Date & Time
Free and open to the public

Event Livestream

Sep 22, 2026 at 06:30 PM EDT

LIVESTREAM INFO

A live stream for this event will be available on this page at the scheduled start time. Closed captioning is available by clicking the “CC” icon at the bottom of the player window.

About this Event

Professor Gary Hilderbrand will discuss how the work of his landscape architecture practice, Reed Hilderbrand, is grounded in close site reading and narratives that find precise expression through design. Drawing on projects from the firm’s portfolio spanning the past 25 years, the lecture will explore the evolution of the practice, while reflecting on the reciprocal relationship between pedagogy and professional practice.

Speaker

Gary Hilderbrand is the Peter Louis Hornbeck Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture at Harvard GSD. He founded, with Douglas Reed, the firm Reed Hilderbrand Landscape Architects, and he is a fellow and resident of the American Academy in Rome. His acclaimed publications include The Miller Garden: Icon of Modernism and Visible | Invisible: Landscape Works of Reed Hilderbrand, along with two dozen essays on the cultures of modernism, urbanism, and the urban forest canopy in landscape architecture.

Headshot of Gary Hilderbrand with his arms crossed.

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