Chris Reed
Chris Reed is Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture and Co-Director of the Master of Landscape Architecture in Urban Design Program at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. He is also Founding Director of Stoss Landscape Urbanism . He is recognized internationally as a leading voice in the transformation of landscapes and cities, and he works alternately as a researcher, strategist, teacher, designer, and advisor. Reed is particularly interested in the relationships between landscape and ecology, infrastructure, social spaces, and cities. His work collectively includes urban revitalization initiatives, climate resilience and adaptation efforts, speculative propositions, adaptations of infrastructure and former industrial sites, dynamic and productive landscapes, vibrant public spaces that cultivate a diversity of social uses and cultural traditions, and numerous landscape installations. His work can be found in cities as diverse as Boston, Los Angeles, St. Louis, Dallas, Detroit, Galveston, Abu Dhabi, and Dongshan, China. His work through Stoss has been recognized with the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award for Landscape Architecture; the Topos International Landscape Award; and various other practice- and project-based awards from Progressive Architecture, the American Society of Landscape Architects, Azure’s AZ Awards, World Landscape Architecture, the Architectural League of New York, the Waterfront Center, EDRA / Places, and the Boston Society of Architects.
Reed is the co-editor of Projective Ecologies with ecologist and planner Nina-Marie Lister, and co-author of the book Mise-en-Scène: The Lives and Afterlives of Urban Landscapes with photographer Mike Belleme. He is a recipient of the 2012 Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award in Landscape Architecture, a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects, and the 2017 Mercedes T. Bass Landscape Architect in Residence at the American Academy in Rome. Reed received a Master in Landscape Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania and an AB in Urban Studies from Harvard College.
Pablo Pérez-Ramos
Pablo Pérez-Ramos is Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he coordinates the first-semester Landscape Architecture Core Studio and teaches research seminars and lecture courses in landscape theory. He holds Doctor of Design and Master in Landscape Architecture degrees from the GSD and is a licensed architect from the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid (ETSAM).
Pérez-Ramos’s research focuses on the aesthetic and formal associations between design and the natural sciences, and is informed by interests in material culture, the environmental humanities, and the philosophy of science. He has delved into the origins of ecological narratives in contemporary landscape architecture by examining the central debates in ecological theory throughout the twentieth century. His interest in the intersection of science and design has broadened more recently to encompass the fields of thermodynamics, biological systematics, and evolutionary theory. This theoretical agenda underpins ongoing research on climate adaptation strategies, traditional knowledge, and agroecological practices in productive landscapes in conditions of extreme heat and aridity, including the Maghreb region, Northwest India, Peru, and the Central Valleys in Oaxaca, Mexico. His work is ultimately concerned with the formal tensions and interferences existing between human technology and the other physical forces and processes—tectonic, atmospheric, biological—that shape landscapes.
Prior to his appointment at the GSD, Pérez-Ramos coordinated the Urban Landscape Program at the Northeastern University School of Architecture and taught at the Boston Architectural College (BAC) and the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid. Between 2012 and 2016, he served as regional planning coordinator for the 2025 Masterplan for the Metropolitan District of Quito, and before that, he practiced as a licensed architect in Madrid.
He was a member of the editorial board of the New Geographies journal between 2013 and 2018 and editor-in-chief (with Daniel Daou) of New Geographies 08: Island (Harvard GSD, 2016). His writings have also been published in the Journal of Landscape Architecture (JoLA), The International Journal of Islamic Architecture (IJIA), PLOT, MONU, Revista Arquitectura (COAM), Landscape Research Record (CELA), and in the edited volumes The Landscape as Union between Art and Science: The Legacy of Alexander von Humboldt and Ernst Haeckel (Quodlibet, 2023), MedWays Open Atlas (LetteraVentidue, 2022), Architecture is All Over (Columbia University Press, 2017), and Urban Landscape: Critical Concepts in Built Environment (Routledge, 2015), among others.
Pérez-Ramos’ research and academic work at Harvard has been funded by the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, the William F. Milton Fund, the Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities, the Alwaleed Islamic Studies Program, La Caixa Foundation, and Caja Madrid Foundation among others, and his design work has received numerous awards in competitions of architecture and urbanism.
Nicholas Nelson
Nick has over 18 years of experience as a fluvial geomorphologist and river restoration practitioner. Nick is the northeast regional director for Inter-Fluve, a river and wetland restoration firm working on projects throughout the country and internationally. His work with Inter-Fluve has focused on dam removal and channel restoration/rehabilitation planning and design, urban river restoration and renewal, the restoration of retired cranberry bogs to native stream and wetland ecosystems, geomorphic and habitat assessments, construction observation, and GIS analyses. At the GSD since 2016, Nick attempts to connect hydrologic and ecologic concepts with the typical landscape architecture background through actual designed and constructed examples and field excursions. Nick was an instructor at the CAUP International Design Summer School held at the College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Tongji University, in 2017. Nick taught Applications of GIS in River Restoration at the University of Minnesota biennially between 2007 and 2014 and Environmental Planning at Northeastern University annually since 2014. He taught fluvial geomorphology to MA conservation commissioners at the annual conferences since 2012 and is currently on a task force to aid in developing geomorphic and stability assessment protocols for MA rivers.
Mohsen Mostafavi
Mohsen Mostafavi, architect and educator, is the Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design and Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor, and served as Dean of the GSD from 2008-2019. His work focuses on modes and processes of urbanization and on the interface between technology and aesthetics.
He was formerly the Gale and Ira Drukier Dean of the College of Architecture, Art and Planning at Cornell University where he was also the Arthur L. and Isabel B. Wiesenberger Professor in Architecture. Previously, he was the Chairman of the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. He studied architecture at the AA, and undertook research on counter-reformation urban history at the Universities of Essex and Cambridge. He has been the Director of the Master of Architecture I Program at the GSD and has also taught at the University of Pennsylvania, University of Cambridge, and the Frankfurt Academy of Fine Arts (Städelschule).
Mostafavi is a Trustee of Smith College, an Honorary Trustee of the Norman Foster Foundation, and served on the Board of the Van Alen Institute as well as the Steering Committee and the Jury of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture. At Harvard, he co-chaired the Harvard University Committee for the Arts, served on the Smith Campus Center Executive Committee, the Harvard Allston Steering Committee, and co-chaired the Steering Committee on Common Spaces. He is also a member of the Executive Committee of the Mahindra Humanities Center, the Harvard Innovation Lab Advisory Board, the Executive Board of The Laboratory at Harvard, and the Committee on Middle Eastern Studies.
Mostafavi has chaired the jury of the Mies van der Rohe Prize for Architecture and the European, Global, and North American juries of the LafargeHolcim Awards for Sustainable Construction. He served on the design committee of the London Development Agency (LDA), the juries for the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Gold Medal and Annie Spink Award, and the advisory committee on campus planning of the Asian University for Women.
He is a consultant on a number of international architectural and urban projects. His research and design projects have been published in many journals, including The Architectural Review, AAFiles, Arquitectura, Bauwelt, Casabella, Centre, Daidalos, and El Croquis. His books include On Weathering: The Life of Buildings in Time (co-authored 1993), which received the American Institute of Architects prize for writing on architectural theory; Delayed Space (co-authored 1994); Approximations (2002); Surface Architecture (2002); Logique Visuelle (2003); Landscape Urbanism: A Manual for the Machinic Landscape (2004); Structure as Space (2006); Ecological Urbanism (co-edited 2010 and recently translated into Chinese, Portuguese, and Spanish); Implicate & Explicate (2011); Louis Vuitton: Architecture and Interiors (2011); In the Life of Cities (2012); Instigations: Engaging Architecture, Landscape and the City (co-edited 2012); Architecture is Life (2013); Nicholas Hawksmoor: The London Churches (2015); Architecture and Plurality (2016); Portman’s America & Other Speculations (2017); and Ethics of the Urban: The City and the Spaces of the Political (2017).
Rosetta S. Elkin
on leave Spring 2020
GARDEN CLUB OF AMERICA ROME PRIZE
Rosetta S. Elkin is Principal of RSE Landscape, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, and Faculty Associate at Harvard Arnold Arboretum. Her research and teaching consider living environments with a particular focus on plant morphology, behavior, and intelligence. She is committed to design as a means to address the risk, injustice, and instability brought about by planetary climate disintegration. Her practice prioritizes public exhibitions, open access publishing, and collaborative research to promote a more thoughtful and accountable design agenda. She is currently the recipient of the 2018 Garden Club of America Rome Prize in landscape architecture.
As a registered landscape architect in the Netherlands, Elkin founded RSE Landscape in 2007. Current projects include the study of root systems in coastal defense strategies, an investigation of state-scale ecological transformation in Rhode Island, and design research for sea-level adaptation on barrier islands in Florida. RSE Landscape is also currently working on a commission from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation concerning landscape adaptation on Captiva Island, Florida, and a Harvard Climate Change Fund-supported project that documents climate-induced retreat case studies worldwide.
Elkin is the author of Tiny Taxonomy (Actar 2017), a publication which reflects on the scale of individual plants in practice through a reading of three design installations. With support from the Graham Foundation, Dutch Fonds BKVB, and Canada Council for the Arts, she is currently working on a monograph publication about the geo-political ambitions of continental tree planting programs. Elkin’s work has been exhibited at the Victory and Albert Museum, Les Jardins de Metis, Chelsea Festival, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and featured in publications including Journal of Landscape Architecture, New Geographies, Harvard Design Magazine and Lotus International. Before joining the GSD as the Daniel Urban Kiley Fellow, she was a Senior Designer and Project Manager at Inside/Outside in Amsterdam and taught at the Academie Bouwkunst and the Gerrit Rietveld Academy.
Gareth Doherty
Dr. Gareth Doherty ASLA takes a human-centered approach to design and theory that aspires to shape environmentally and socially just landscapes. Doherty contributes to core knowledge in landscape architecture through applying ethnographic fieldwork and participatory design methodologies to design and theory. This work critically reassesses 20th-century approaches to the observed landscape to advance new pedagogy, tools, and techniques that address contemporary design issues of equity, identity, cultural space, and the human impacts of climate change. Through what he terms “landscape fieldwork,” Doherty unravels diverse landscape narratives that have not yet been formally documented as evidenced through his books, Paradoxes of Green: Landscapes of a City-State (University of California Press, 2017), Landscape Fieldwork: How Engaging the World Can Change Design (University of Virginia Press, 2025); and his recent fieldwork on African landscape architecture.
Doherty bases his work on two questions. First, how can landscape architecture theory, education, and practice benefit from working with societies with no formal landscape architecture discipline? Second, how does comparing landscapes of diverse societies better inform landscape architects’ sensitivity to the values that shape others’ attitudes towards the landscapes they dwell in and make? Doherty addresses these questions through research on designed landscapes across the postcolonial and Islamic worlds, primarily in the Arabian Peninsula, Brazil, the Caribbean, and the African continent.
In Doherty’s book, Paradoxes of Green: Landscapes of a City-State , he analyzed a Bahraini category for landscape—greenery—al-khudra in Arabic. He spent a year walking through Bahrain, learning local language, talking with people, and recording his encounters with green, as color and as an environmental movement. The paradox at the heart of the book is that the manifestation of the color green in arid urban environments is often in direct conflict with the practice of green from an environmental point of view. Explicit in the book is the argument that concepts of color and object are mutually defining, and thus a discussion about green becomes a discussion about the creation of space and place. The Spanish translation, Paradojas de lo Verde: Paisajes de una ciudad-Estado , was published by Puente Editores.
Doherty’s edited books include Landscape is…! Essays on the Meaning of Landscape (Routledge, forthcoming) a sequel to Is Landscape…? Essays on the Identity of Landscape , edited with Charles Waldheim (Routledge, 2015, and China Architecture and Building Press, 2019). Doherty is editor of Roberto Burle Marx Lectures: Landscape as Art and Urbanism (Lars Müller Publishers, 2018, revised 2020). Doherty is a founding editor of the New Geographies journal and editor-in-chief of New Geographies 3: Urbanisms of Color (2011). Doherty edited Ecological Urbanism (Lars Müller Publishers, 2010, revised 2016) with Mohsen Mostafavi, which has been translated in several languages. Doherty has published in journals such as Built Environment, Harvard Design Magazine, Kerb, Topos, and Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes.
Doherty received the Doctor of Design degree from Harvard GSD and his Master of Landscape Architecture and Certificate in Urban Design from the University of Pennsylvania. He earned masters and undergraduate degrees from University College Dublin. He has several built landscape architectural projects, and is a member of professional associations in Nigeria, the United States, and the United Kingdom.
In Fall 2024, Doherty co-taught Theories of Landscape as Urbanism with Charles Waldheim (DES-3241); and offered the Proseminar in Landscape Architecture for Master in Landscape Architecture II students (ADV-9641). In Spring 2025, Doherty taught African Landscape Architecture: Alternative Futures for the Field (DES-3514 and AFRAMER 143Y) cross-listed between the Department of Landscape Architecture and the Department of African and African American Studies.
Salmaan Craig
Salmaan is a designer, educator, consultant and occasional writer, who specializes in materials design and building physics. He studied product design before undertaking a doctorate in environmental technology hosted by Brunel University and Buro Happold consulting engineers. During this time he designed and tested a biologically inspired material for protecting buildings from solar and ambient heat, while allowing them to cool through radiation to outer space.
After completing his doctorate, Salmaan continued at Buro Happold as a Facade Engineer, specializing in the design of material systems in extreme climates, such as the perforated, multilayer dome of the Louvre Abu Dhabi. He then moved to the Specialist Modeling Group at Foster+Partners, continuing to develop his research interests in the context of a number of high profile building projects, such as the
Masdar Institute, Apple Campus, and Bloomberg Place.
Now at Harvard University, Salmaan splits his time between the Graduate School of Design—where he lectures on energy and materials in architecture—and the Center for Green Buildings and Cities. He is working on how to design thermally autonomous buildings for the next billion people, using ‘smart geometry’ and ‘dumb materials’, and the internet to share and develop the results (you can follow and contribute to the fledgling activity on PubPub). He also practices as a independent consultant, and his clients include Timberland, Ábalos & Sentkiewicz Arquitectos, and Empresa de Desarrollo Urbano (EDU) of Medellín.
Danielle Choi
Danielle Narae Choi is an Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a licensed landscape architect. Her research examines landscape design as a cultural practice that synthesizes broader concerns of science, technology, and infrastructure.
Choi’s current research is an environmental study of 20th-century interior landscapes. A subset of public projects were volatile sites of negotiation between plant vitality and human comfort; colonial botany and situated traditional knowledge; new aesthetic agendas and entrenched urban crisis. Ongoing research investigates infrastructural breaches of continental divides in North America and their implications for the concept of genius loci in landscape architecture.
Choi’s writing has been published in the Journal of Architectural Education, Harvard Design Magazine, Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes, Landscape Architecture Magazine, and in the volume Fresh Water, edited by Mary Pat McGuire and Jessica Henson. A forthcoming essay, Landscape is. . . Labor will appear in the volume Landscape Is. . .!, edited by Gareth Doherty and Charles Waldheim.
Before her appointment at the GSD, Choi practiced professionally with Topotek in Berlin and Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA) in New York. As a senior associate at MVVA, she led the strategy and design of complex projects ranging in scale from gardens to parks to urban framework plans, leading large, multi-disciplinary teams. Choi draws upon this experience to examine the realms of knowledge, social relations, and labor required to produce (and that are produced by) living landscapes.
Choi holds a degree in art history from the University of Chicago and a Master in Landscape Architecture degree from the GSD, where she received the Jacob Weidenman award for excellence in design.
Bradley Cantrell
Bradley Cantrell is a landscape architect and scholar whose work focuses on the role of computation and media in environmental and ecological design. Professor Cantrell received his BSLA from the University of Kentucky and his MLA from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He has held academic appointments at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, The Rhode Island School of Design, and the Louisiana State University Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture where he led the school as graduate coordinator and director. His work in Louisiana over the past decade points to a series of methodologies that develop modes of modeling, simulation, and embedded computation that express and engage the complexity of overlapping physical, cultural, and economic systems. Cantrell’s work has been presented and published in a range of peer reviewed venues internationally including ACADIA, CELA, EDRA, ASAH, and ARCC.
Cantrell’s research and teaching focuses on digital film, simulation, and modeling techniques to represent landscape form, process, and phenomenology. His work in digital representation ranges from improving the workflow of digital media in the design process, to providing a methodology for deconstructing landscape through compositing and film editing techniques. His work in media has been recognized through a range of venues and has engaged both public and private clients.
Cantrell is the co-author of two books that focus on digital representation techniques specific to the profession of landscape architecture. The first book, Digital Drawing for Landscape Architecture, connects traditional analog techniques and methods of representation to similar digital methodologies. Digital Drawing for Landscape Architecture won a 2012 ASLA Award of Excellence and has become a standard text for many landscape architecture programs as well as professional reference that is currently being published in its second edition. The second book, Modeling the Environment, explores an approach to digital modeling that is specific to environmental design and landscape architecture. The methodologies highlighted in the book foreground environment, topography, and temporal processes through the lens of the digital composite.
Addressing the synthesis of computation and ecology, Cantrell develops and designs devices and infrastructures that create complex interrelationships between maintenance, evolved processes, and environmental response. This approach specifically addresses the interface between old modes of representation and direct connections to ecological processes. In collaboration with co-author Justine Holzman, Cantrell is currently developing a manuscript to be published by Routledge in the Fall of 2015 entitled, Responsive Landscapes. Responsive Landscapes highlights a range of case studies in architecture, landscape architecture, computer science, and art that employ responsive technologies as mediators of landscape processes.
Pierre Bélanger
Pierre Bélanger is Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. In the Department of Landscape Architecture, Bélanger teaches and coordinates graduate courses at the intersection of ecology, infrastructure, media and urbanism in the interrelated fields of design, communications, planning and engineering. With a multimedia approach and cross-scalar approach to design in both research and practice, his core interests lie at the convergence of the study of territory, ecology, and power.
In response to the inertia of urban planning and the overexertion of civil engineering in public works today, Bélanger’s contribution to the field of “landscape infrastructure” has been shared and developed in collaboration with governments, professionals and academics worldwide. Vis-à-vis the complexities, magnitudes and indeterminacies of urban change, Bélanger’s core commitment lies in the agency of landscape architecture and the field of landscape to redefine the morphology of urban infrastructure and future of urban land in design, research, pedagogy and practice.
In addition to the recent publication of the 35th edition of the Pamphlet Architecture Series, GOING LIVE: From Models to Systems (Princeton Architectural Press, 2015), Bélanger has published two core books on infrastructure and urbanism including, LANDSCAPE AS INFRASTRUCTURE: A Base Primer (Taylor & Francis, 2016) and ECOLOGIES OF POWER: Countermapping the Military Geographies & Logistical Landscapes of the U.S. Department of Defense (MIT Press, 2016) co-authored with Alexander Arroyo. Dr. Bélanger’s work has been recognized by professional associations and scholars worldwide with publications in Journal of Landscape Architecture, Ecological Urbanism, New Geographies, Landscape Journal, Topos, The Landscape Urbanism Reader, Geoinformatics, Journal of Tunneling and Underground Space Technology, Trash, Food, and Canadian Architect. Bélanger’s recent editorial work includes Harvard Design Magazine Issue No.39 “Wet Matter” (Fall/Winter 2014) in collaboration with Jennifer Sigler, and recent publications include “Altitudes of Urbanization” (2016), “Out of Time” (2016), “Is Landscape Infrastructure” (2015), “The Alvsjø Flatbed” (2015), “Between the Tides of Apartheid” (2014), “Ecology 5.0” (2014), “Landscape Infrastructure: Urbanism Beyond Engineering” (2012), “The Agronomic Landscape” (2011), “Regionalization” (2010), “Redefining Infrastructure” (2010), “Power Perestroika” (2010), “Landscape as Infrastructure” (2009), “Landscapes of Disassembly” (2007), “Synthetic Surfaces” (2007), “Foodshed: The Cosmopolitan Infrastructure of the Ontario Food Terminal” (2007) and “Airspace: The Economy and Ecology of Landfilling in Michigan” (2006).
Bélanger has received several international prizes in design and planning competitions and he is only the Landscape Architect to have received the Professional Prix de Rome in Architecture and Curator’s Award for the Venice Architecture Biennale awarded by the Canada Council for the Arts, as well as the first landscape architect to author the Pamphlet Architecture Series since its founding in 1978.
Appointed National Curator of the Canadian Pavilion by the Canada Council for the Arts for the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale, he is the first landscape architect ever to be selected for the venue of the Biennale since its creation in 1980. Titled, EXTRACTION, the project profiles Canada’s position as the preeminent extraction nation on the planet and its rise as global resource empire over the past 800 years since the creation of the Magna Carta in the Year 1215. Looking at fundamental issues of land, territory and power, the project examines the scales, sources, and systems of extraction that underlie the mineral media of contemporary urban life. The project has been profiled internationally in The Walrus, Border Crossings, The New York Observer, ArchDaily, and CBC Radio and will result in a book to be published by MIT Press, EXTRACTION EMPIRE, in Spring 2018.
As former Project Manager for Brinkman & Associates of Earth Partners LLC—the world’s largest reforestation and bioengineering contractor, Bélanger completed doctoral studies on infrastructural environments at the Life Sciences University of Wageningen (WUR, The Netherlands) with PhD cum laude, the first graduate from the School of Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning to ever receive this distinction in Wageningen’s history since 1918. Prior to this, Bélanger completed graduate studies for the Master in Landscape Architecture at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design where he received the Janet Darling Webel and Norman T. Newton Prizes in design. Originally trained at the University of Toronto under the tutelage of Dr. Detlef Mertins, George Baird and Robert Wright, Dr. Bélanger is professionally registered as a Landscape Architect in Canada and the United States, and as Urban Planner in the Netherlands.
Combining knowledge from different fields and media, Bélanger collaborates with government agencies, resource industries, civil authorities, professional organizations, universities, corporations and a team of interdisciplinary practitioners in the design and development of territorial strategies. Through the inception of OPSYS / Landscape Infrastructure Lab in 2006 (a federally incorporated, non-profit, design-research organization in Canada and the United States), Bélanger initiates and coordinates a portfolio of projects funded by public/private partnerships that include The World Bank Group, the Government of Haiti Civil Protection Service, the U.S. Department of Defense, Transport Canada, New York State, Charles River Conservancy, Foreign Affairs & International Trade Canada, the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council, the Toronto Region Conservation Authority, Jardin International de Métis, the Greater Toronto Airports Authority, Waste Management Inc., the City of Toronto, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.