Craig Douglas
Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture

Craig Douglas is a Landscape Architect whose work focuses on innovative techniques and methodologies that explore the agency of representation in landscape architectural design. He is an Assistant Professor in the Landscape Architecture Department at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University. His work explores the landscape as a dynamic material process in a constant state of flux through analytical and conceptual approaches integrating drawing, modelling, simulation, and sensing to make visible and reconstitute the landscape as a complex temporal and material manifold of differential space.
His work on ‘Digital Air’ claims air as matter by reconceptualising it as a material that is both corporeal and technological. In resisting conventional forms of definition and representation, air as matter invites the potential of emergence and production to augment our static realities. This material dialectic changes how we perceive and understand the scope of landscape architecture and how we might compose the architecture of our cities and landscapes in which air is identified as a principal agent for design.
The research explores the measuring and mapping of the air as matter oscillating between physical, corporeal, and cultural definitions by redefining it as a landscape of living and living space through atmospheric encounters. This is an investigation and reconceptualization of air as a dynamic, emergent process displaying flows, forces, and forms of change in a constant and unstable state of flux across a range of spatial scales, physical states, and temporal modes. Shifting the perception of air from an immaterial and wholly natural element to a material matter co-created by humans requalifies its significance, highlights the precarious relationship we have with it, and provides ways through which we might reconceptualise air and our relationship with it. ‘Digital Air’ considers the potential to inform new modes of understanding and practice that are relevant to the changes the climate crisis brings by making it possible to respond to projected states of being and to simultaneously consider how we might act through dynamic states of change.
His approach supports informed and innovative responses to the challenges found at the nexus of the social, ecological, and built environment that embrace the spatial, temporal, and material complexity of the landscape. It explores design as an activity of making and as an agent for understanding and responding to the challenges of urbanisation in a rapidly changing world that contributes to the complexity of the contemporary city in the age of climate crisis.
Douglas’ teaching includes the coordination of the Landscape Architecture Core II Design Studio and Representation II courses alongside Option Studios, Seminars, Independent Studies, Core III, and Thesis supervision. He has practised in offices in Australia, The Netherlands, and the United Kingdom on complex urban projects and continues to collaborate on projects with practices around the world.
Courses
Projects
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Plot Zero: Sensing the Landscape to Map the Dynamic Atmospheric Environment of the Urban Fabric
Craig Douglas, Lead Faculty
Fall 2024
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Running the Course: Unifying Franklin Park One Step at a Time
Craig Douglas, Instructor
Spring 2020
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Return to Pleasant Island: A study of Nauru Island
Rosalea Monacella and Craig Douglas, Instructors
Fall 2018
Exhibitions
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Air as Matter: Atmospheric Encounters
Craig Douglas, Curator
FEB 7 – MAR 16, 2025
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Our Artificial Nature: Design Research for an Era of Environmental Change
Craig Douglas, Contributor
Elizabeth Christoforetti, CuratorNOV 13 – DEC 21, 2023
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Energy||Power
Shaping the American LandscapeRosalea Monacella, Curator
Craig Douglas, ResearcherJAN 24 – MAR 13, 2020
Events
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Setting the Course: Future Core Studio Pedagogies in Landscape Architecture
Craig Douglas, Panelist
Rosalea Monacella, Lead Faculty