Anne Whiston Spirn, “Restoring Nature, Rebuilding Community”
Anne Whiston Spirn, “Restoring Nature, Rebuilding Community”
Event Description
What would it mean for a city to be ecologically robust and socially just? What would such a place be like? Through what means might such a vision be accomplished? And how might change be created and sustained? These are not questions to be explored in the abstract. They call for action research, for testing ideas in practice, and engaging with real people in actual places to make discoveries from which principles can be drawn.
For the past four decades, Anne Whiston Spirn’s research and teaching have demonstrated how to combine concerns for environment, poverty, race, social equity, and educational reform, and how university resources can be leveraged to address environmental and social challenges that confound society. These initiatives have resulted in projects and programs in partnership with community residents, and contributed to a revolution in water-quality management, represented by Philadelphia’s landmark, billion-dollar “green” infrastructure project.
Speaker
Anne Whiston Spirn is the Cecil and Ida Green Distinguished Professor of Landscape Architecture and Planning at MIT. The American Planning Association named her first book, The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design (1984), as one of the 100 most important books of the 20th century and credited it with launching the ecological urbanism movement. Since 1987, Spirn has directed the West Philadelphia Landscape Project (WPLP), an action research project whose mission is to restore nature and rebuild community through strategic design, planning, and education programs . Spirn’s second book, The Language of Landscape(1998), argues that landscape is a form of language. She continued to develop the subject of visual literacy and visual thinking in her award-winning book, Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange’s Photographs and Reports from the Field (2008), and The Eye Is a Door: Landscape, Photography, and the Art of Discovery (2014). Prior to MIT, Spirn taught at Harvard University and at the University of Pennsylvania. Spirn’s work has been recognized by many awards, including Japan’s International Cosmos Prize for “contributions to the harmonious coexistence of nature and mankind,” and the National Design Award for Design Mind, for “a visionary who has had a profound impact on design theory, practice, or public awareness.” Spirn’s homepage is a gateway to her work and activities.
Anita Berrizbeitia, “The Blue Hills: Charles Eliot’s Design Experiment (1893-1897)”
Anita Berrizbeitia, “The Blue Hills: Charles Eliot’s Design Experiment (1893-1897)”
A recording of this event is available with audio description .
Event Description
This lecture explores how developments in the earth sciences—specifically geology, evolutionism, and biogeography—ushered in advances in design methodologies for large public–realm landscapes in late nineteenth-century Boston.
In my earlier work on Charles Eliot’s Metropolitan Park System of 1892, I argued that geology had provided a framework for re-envisioning what had become a fragmented territory as a unified whole. Eliot proposed the region’s formative processes and the thick and unseen strata underlying the visible and varied topography in and around Boston as the foundation for a new political geography for a rapidly expanding city. For the Blue Hills, the largest of the reservations of the park system, Eliot turns his attention to the surface, proposed as a mantle of vegetation that drapes over the hills’ granitic foundation. Eliot introduces methods of biogeography to fieldwork, of forestry and conservation, and of what today we call restoration ecology. However, Eliot also prompts us to reconsider the role of the wild and wilderness, and of aesthetics in relationship to a growing public. Rather than being the product of a singular or unified framework, his proposal shows us the intertwining of multiple design methods and ways of knowing that join notions of the “wild” and of the “urban.”
Speaker
Anita Berrizbeitia is a Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She served as Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture between 2015-2022 and as Program Director of the Master in Landscape Architecture Degree Programs between 2012-2015. Her research explores nineteenth and twentieth-century public realm landscapes, with interests in material culture, urban political ecology, and the productive functions of landscapes in processes of urbanization and climate adaptation. Her research on Latin American cities and landscapes focuses, in addition, on the role of large-scale infrastructural projects on territorial organization, climate adaptation, and on the interface between landscape and emerging urbanization.
A licensed landscape architect, she has worked on a broad range of projects and competitions, including urban design, campus planning, public parks, and residential gardens. She is a consultant for national and international landscape architectural firms and has served on juries of multiple design competitions in the US and abroad, including Chair of the Jury of the Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome, and design competitions in Chile, Ecuador, Argentina, Spain, and the Middle East. At Harvard, she serves on the university’s Design Review Board, the Harvard University Committee on the Arts and the Radcliffe Institute Public Art Competition. She serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Landscape Architecture (JoLA). Before joining the GSD in 2009 she was a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania.
At the GSD she has taught core Landscape Architecture studios and core Urban Design studios. Her option studios have focused on urban and territorial scale infrastructures, on emergent urbanization, and climate adaptation. She has also taught design theory in both the core and elective curricula.
Berrizbeitia is editor of Urban Landscape—Critical Concepts in Built Environment Series; editor of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates: Reconstructing Urban Landscapes (Yale University Press), which received an ASLA Honor Award; author of Roberto Burle Marx in Caracas: Parque del Este, 1956–1961 (Penn Press), awarded the inaugural J.B. Jackson Book Prize in 2007 from the Foundation for Landscape Studies; and co-author with Linda Pollak of Inside/Outside: Between Architecture and Landscape, which won an ASLA Merit Award. Her essays have been published widely in journals and anthologies, including the Journal of Landscape Architecture (JoLA); Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes; Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts (National Gallery of Art); Cultural History of Gardens (Berg Publishers); Sao Paolo: A Graphic Biography (University of Texas Press), Cerros Islas Santiago (Fundación Cerros Islas); Recovering Landscape (Princeton Architectural Press); CASE: Downsview Park Toronto (Prestel); Large Parks (Princeton Architectural Press); and Retorno al Paisaje (Evren) among others. With Diane Davis, she co-edited Harvard Design Magazine 49: Publics (2021).
Berrizbeitia received a BA from Wellesley College in Studio Art and an MLA from the GSD. She was awarded the Prince Charitable Trusts Rome Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome in 2006.
Ethan Carr, “Letting It Alone at Franklin Park: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”
Ethan Carr, “Letting It Alone at Franklin Park: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”
A recording of this event is available with audio description.
Event Description
This year’s Frederick Law Olmsted Lecture, delivered by Ethan Carr, is also the keynote lecture for the conference Olmsted: Bicentennial Perspectives, October 14-15, 2022. On Friday, the conference will run from 10:00 AM – 7:00 PM; the Frederick Law Olmsted Lecture will take place from 5:30 – 7:00 PM that evening.
“Well, they have let it alone a good deal more than I thought they would!” Horace Greeley on his first visit to Central Park (according to Clarence Cook, 1869)
“We have let it alone more than most gardeners can. But never too much, hardly enough.” Frederick Law Olmsted to Calvert Vaux, 1887
Olmsted designed his most complete and innovative park system in Boston, including a “large park” that contained his most ambitious pastoral landscape. Often grouped with Central Park (1858) and Prospect Park (1865) as one of his three greatest urban parks, Boston’s Franklin Park (1885) cost less than a third as much to develop. But the desire to “let it alone” was more than a pecuniary impulse. Achieving more by doing less culminated an evolution in his design practice. The landscape of upland pastures and hanging woods persisted as an amplified version of what it had been: a characteristic passage of “rural” New England scenery. For Olmsted, letting it alone both preserved and transformed the landscape into an ideal setting for “receptive” recreations that improved individual wellbeing and built a sense of community in the modern city.
When the problem of low visitation to Franklin Park was identified at the end of the nineteenth century, Boston responded with the construction of the Franklin Park Zoo (1912) and successfully activated the park. But in the mid-twentieth century, a decline in the condition of the park drew an opposite response—another and very different way of letting it alone. Buildings and structures were left to deteriorate and landscape maintenance all but disappeared. Institutional racism influenced official policy: once Franklin Park was perceived as a place for Black people, city government no longer considered it worth maintaining. This fact has been obscured by histories that emphasize a perceived obsolescence of the design or the conflict of “active” and “passive” recreation as causes of the park’s supposed demise. These interpretations suggest that the park should be considered an abandoned ruin awaiting redevelopment. But Franklin Park was never abandoned. For over fifty years people in the communities around it have enjoyed the park, organized programming, and performed maintenance. The official neglect of Franklin Park is nevertheless one of great inequities in the city’s history, and new investment and design must address it—perhaps by finding a right way, again, to let it alone.
To attend this keynote address, please register for Olmsted: Bicentennial Perspectives.
Speaker
Ethan Carr, PhD, FASLA, is a Professor of Landscape Architecture and the Director of the Master of Landscape Architecture program at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is a landscape historian and preservationist specializing in public landscapes. Three of his award-winning books, Wilderness by Design (University of Nebraska Press, 1998), Mission 66: Modernism and the National Park Dilemma (University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), and The Greatest Beach: A History of Cape Cod National Seashore (University of Georgia Press, 2019), describe the twentieth-century history of planning and design in the US national park system as a context for considering its future. Carr was the lead editor for The Early Boston Years, 1882-1890, Volume 8 of the Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted (2013). Carr co-wrote Olmsted and Yosemite: Civil War, Abolition, and the National Park Idea (Library Of American Landscape History, 2022) with Rolf Diamant, tracing the origins of the American park movement. His latest book, Boston’s Franklin Park: Olmsted, Recreation, and the Modern City (2023) reconsiders the history of this landmark urban park. Carr consults with landscape architecture firms that are developing plans and designs for historic landscapes.
Jamaica Kincaid
Jamaica Kincaid
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| The GSD’s Fall 2021 Public Programs are all virtual and require registration.
Click here to register for Frederick Law Olmsted Lecture: Jamaica Kincaid. The event will also be live streamed to the Harvard GSD YouTube page. Only viewers who are attending the lecture via Zoom will be able to submit questions for the Q+A. If you would like to submit questions for the speaker in advance of the event, please click here.
Live captioning will be provided during this event.
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Speaker
Jamaica Kincaid is a widely acclaimed and fiercely original writer known for her novels, short stories, and essays, including writings on her life as a gardener. She was also staff writer for the New Yorker from 1973 to 1996 and has been a contributor for the Village Voice.
She is beloved by generations of readers who discovered her fiction, including Annie John and “Girl,” in high school and is admired by critics for her daring and unorthodox body of work. Answering claims that her fiction and essays are characterized by anger, Kincaid says, “The important thing isn’t whether I’m angry. The more important thing is, is it true? Do these things really happen? I think I’m saying something true. I’m not angry … The way I think of it is that I’m telling the truth.”
In the New York Review of Books, Darryl Pinckney wrote, “Kincaid’s rhythms and the circularity of her thought patterns in language bring Gertrude Stein to mind. She is an eccentric and altogether impressive descendant.”
Kincaid is the recipient of a Guggenheim grant and has been nominated for the National Book Award. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2004 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009.
Kincaid was born in Antigua, British West Indies, in 1949, and arrived in the United States in 1965 to work as an au pair. In 1973, she changed her name from Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson to Jamaica Kincaid, mostly to prevent her parents from finding out that she was writing. She’s now the mother of two grown children and is a professor in the African and African American Studies department at Harvard University.
Everett L. Fly, “American Cultural Landscapes: Black Roots and Treasures”
Everett L. Fly, “American Cultural Landscapes: Black Roots and Treasures”
The GSD is pleased to present a series of talks and webinars broadcast to our audiences via Zoom.
*This lecture will be ONLINE ONLY. For security reasons, virtual attendees must register. Scroll down to find complete instructions for how to register.
Event Description
Everett L. Fly believes that African American legacies are embedded in the physical and cultural substance of many of America’s built and vernacular places. Formal education in architecture introduced him to the positive potential of planning and design in respecting and expressing the cultures of people wherever they live, work and play. He believes that American planning and design should be more deliberate in reflecting and respecting a broader cultural diversity, including Black and Indigenous people.
As a first year student in the Harvard Department of Landscape Architecture, Fly was introduced to leading scholars, including John Brinckerhoff Jackson. Under Jackson’s tutelage he began to research and study the origins and evolution of historic Black settlements across the United States. Fly began to develop an interdisciplinary research methodology which could be applied to planning design, practical conservation, preservation, and interpretation of African American and underrepresented communities, buildings and landscapes.
Fly’s projects have been used to inspire interest and protect some of America’s most threatened, and treasured, historic African American resources.
Fly will discuss research, discovery, interpretation and applications of his preservation and cultural landscape work, including autonomous Black settlements, urban enclaves, districts, schools, churches, cemeteries, cultural rituals and traditions.
Speaker
Everett L. Fly , MLA ’77, native of San Antonio, Texas, resides in the city with his wife Rosalinda. An honors graduate of the University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture, he is the first African American graduate of Harvard University’s Department of Landscape Architecture. He is a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects.
Fly’s forty year practice as a licensed landscape architect and architect includes national multidisciplinary consultations for the National Park Service and the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
He served on the State of Texas National Register Board of Review and City of San Antonio Historic and Design Review Commission. He chaired the board of Humanities Texas from 1993 to 1994.
Fly served appointments by President Bill Clinton to the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities from 1994 to 2001. President Barack Obama awarded him one of ten 2014 National Humanities Medals for his body of work preserving the integrity of African-American places and landmarks.
Recent awards include the 2018 San Antonio Power of Preservation Foundation “Champion of Preservation Award” and the 2020 Conservation Society of San Antonio “Texas Preservation Hero Award”.
He co-founded the San Antonio African American Community Archive and Museum .
Follow Everett L. Fly on Twitter.
How to Join
Register to attend the lecture here . Once you have registered, you will be provided with a link to join the lecture via Zoom. This link will also be emailed to you.
The event will also be live streamed to the GSD’s YouTube page . Only viewers who are attending the lecture via Zoom will be able to submit questions for the Q+A. If you would like to submit questions for the speaker in advance of the event, please click here .
Live captioning will be provided during this event. A transcript will be available roughly two weeks after the event, upon request.
Günther Vogt, “The Imprint of the Landscape”
Günther Vogt, “The Imprint of the Landscape”
Please join us for the Frederick Law Olmsted Lecture delivered by landscape architect Günther Vogt. Vogt’s lecture will also mark the opening of the exhibition Günther Vogt: First the Forests, which is on view in the Druker Design Gallery from January 21 – March 8, 2020. A reception in the gallery will take place immediately following the lecture.
What is the relevant scale for operating with the landscape of the city?
Since the Industrial Revolution at the latest, humans have become the determining factor for global ecosystems. This fact becomes apparent when we look at sediment displacement influenced by human activity, for example. There is thirty times more of it today than what natural processes cause. Due to our massive intervention in the Earth system, not just new landscapes are formed, however, but the conditions for cohabitation in our cities are also fundamentally changed.
Against this backdrop, solutions proposed by the current ‘green movement’ seem to have little viability. Green facades, vertical gardens or planted bridges deal primarily with esthetic aspects and are neither sustainable nor do they work as part of a network of lived public space. Vegetation is applied onto a construction framework, demoted to the ‘new ornament’ of landscape architecture.
Set against these neatly composed images, Günther Vogt applies a systematic design approach with his projects. Their success is measured not just by their design qualities, but primarily by their consequences for the environment. In the spirit of Friedrick Law Olmsted, who met the changing environmental conditions of his time with a holistic view of space, thinking in systems like this requires incorporating highly diverse scale levels and leads us from the miniature to the panorama of the city landscape.
Günther Vogt’s training at Gartenbauschule Oeschberg provided the practical basis for his intensive landscape work. His knowledge of vegetation and his skills in cultivation continue to be the very cornerstones of his work. His studies with Peter Erni, Jürg Altherr, and Dieter Kienast at Interkantonales Technikum Rapperswil, combined the disciplines of culture, design, and natural sciences. VOGT Landschaftsarchitekten emerged from the office partnership with Dieter Kienast in 2000. With projects such as the Tate Modern in London, Allianz Arena in Munich, or the Masoala Rainforest Hall at the Zurich Zoo, the firm has achieved international recognition. Its work is characterized by the dialogue established between the various disciplines and its close cooperation with artists. Since 2005, Günther Vogt has been pursuing a combination of teaching, practice, and research with his chair at the Institute of Landscape Architecture at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. In 2012 he was a visiting professor at Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD). As a passionate collector and keen traveler, he is looking for ways to read, interpret, and describe landscapes, and finding answers to questions about future forms of urban coexistence.
Michael Van Valkenburgh, “New Parks”
Michael Van Valkenburgh, “New Parks”
Michael Van Valkenburgh is the founder of the landscape architecture firm Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, with offices in Brooklyn, New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts. The firm works at all scales, from large urban green spaces like Brooklyn Bridge Park to intimate gardens like the Monk’s Garden at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Other recent projects include Dorothea Dix Park in Raleigh, The Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, A Gathering Place for Tulsa, and master planning and design for a new neighborhood at the mouth of Toronto’s Lower Don River.
Michael earned a Bachelor of Science in Landscape Architecture from Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and a Master of Fine Arts in Landscape Architecture from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Currently the Charles Eliot Professor Emeritus in Practice of Landscape Architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, Michael is a registered landscape architect in more than 25 states.
Aaron Sachs, “A Common Treasury for All”: Toward a Deeper History of Environmental Justice”
Aaron Sachs, “A Common Treasury for All”: Toward a Deeper History of Environmental Justice”
In recent years, environmental justice scholarship has exploded. But virtually every relevant piece of work has understood the history of environmental justice as dating only to the late 20th century. This talk goes back to the 17th century, seeking to trace and analyze the evolution of a positive environmental rights discourse in European and American history. Having established our opposition to environmental injustice, we might want to ask: what exactly are we aiming for, in positive terms? What are the components of environmental justice? Is there any common ground left to stand on? And how might a deeper historical perspective help us answer these questions?
Aaron Sachs (AB ’92) is Professor of History and American Studies at Cornell University, where he has taught since 2004. In 2006, he published The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism (Viking), which won Honorable Mention for the Frederick Jackson Turner Award, given to the best first book in the field of U.S. history by the Organization of American Historians (OAH). In 2013, he published Arcadian America: The Death and Life of an Environmental Tradition (Yale U. Press), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in general nonfiction. Sachs has also published articles in such journals as Environmental History, Rethinking History, American Quarterly, and History and Theory. In his graduate teaching, he works with students not only in History but also in English, Science and Technology Studies, History of Architecture, City and Regional Planning, Anthropology, and Natural Resources. At Cornell, Sachs is the faculty sponsor of a radical underground organization called Historians Are Writers, which brings together graduate students who believe that academic writing can be moving on a deeply human level. He is also the founder and coordinator of the Cornell Roundtable on Environmental Studies Topics (CREST). Sachs is currently at work on book projects focusing on environmental modernity; environmental justice; and environmental humor.
Charles Waldheim, “A General Theory”
Charles Waldheim will present material from his forthcoming book Landscape as Urbanism: A General Theory (Princeton University Press). Waldheim argues that the discourse and practices of landscape urbanism represent the third historical moment in the past two centuries in which landscape has been called upon to absorb the shocks associated with transformations in industrial economy. Rather than a simply stylistic or cultural question, the talk describes a structural relationship between landscape as a medium of design, and transformations in the industrial economies that enable processes of urbanization. Charles Waldheim is John E. Irving Professor of Landscape Architecture at Harvard GSD.
For accessibility accommodations, please contact the events office in advance at [email protected] or (617) 496-2414.
Peter Latz, “Pioneering New Territory”
Peter Latz, “Pioneering New Territory”
