Susan Snyder
Area Head, Critical Conservation MDes area group
Susan Nigra Snyder is a registered architect practicing with George E. Thomas, Ph.D., a cultural and architectural historian in CivicVisions, based in Philadelphia. CivicVisions merges knowledge of a place’s history with the ability to see how this may be used to create a future that responds to contemporary lifestyle forces. CivicVisions has created a downtown Las Vegas Arts District, an economic/identity initiative for Pennsylvania’s colleges and communities, a Getty Grant exhibit about Haverford’s campus identity and projects for developers and institutions nationwide. Their “Learning from Las Vegas in the Media Age” was selected as one of the top 25 speakers at the AIA 2005 national convention. Ms. Snyder investigates how local identity is expressed, maintained and able to develop while being responsive to larger global and media forces that affect the realms of contemporary life. Her teaching for more than twenty five years at the University of Pennsylvania includes seminars and design studios that investigate the forces of consumption on urban form. Ms. Snyder’s research on contemporary systems seeks to understand the changing shape of urban retail/distribution and the relation between the automobile and contemporary community form. She has received two University of Pennsylvania Research Foundation grants to study processes of urban identity. Public service includes serving as chair of Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority’s Advisory Board of Design, a member of the Fine Arts Committee and of the Delaware Valley Smart Growth Alliance jury.
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.
Niall Kirkwood
“My subject is technology in landscape architecture and its relationship to design.
A professional landscape architect makes a landscape through the natural and constructed landscape medium across the territorial scale to that of individual sites. Landscape architects act deliberately and imaginatively through tactile and material physical design, therefore technology (emerging and traditional) is the most important subject in the discipline of landscape architecture and central to education and professional practices.
The topics of my research, teaching, publishing and design practice include the global post-industrial landscape and innovations in regenerating brownfields, superfund sites, landfills, extraction and mining lands and remediation techniques for polluted air, water, soils and sediments. More recently this has focused on aspects of land retreat, urbanization, flooding, phytoremediation techniques, waste legacies and themes of community and environmental justice.”
I am engaged with landscapes and sites, domestically and internationally that most designers avoid because these places are too damaged, risky, polluted and ultimately too difficult. This is where the work of landscape architecture is most relevant in the 21st century and where true imagination and beauty can lie”.
Niall Kirkwood, FASLA, AAAS, is the Charles Eliot Research Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) where he has taught and carried out research, publishing and consulting since joining the faculty in 1991. He retired as a full-time faculty member in July 1, 2025, and moved to become a research professor at the GSD. He was educated and licensed as a professional landscape architect and architect in the United Kingdom and as a professional landscape architect in the United States. From 2003-2009, he was the thirteenth Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture, the oldest such program in North America, founded in 1901 by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and Arthur Shurcliff. From 1999-2003 and 2005-2007, he was Director of the Master’s in Landscape Architecture Degree Programs (MLA), and from 1999-2003, he was the coordinator of the “Design and Environment” track of the Master in Design Studies Program (MDes). He served as the GSD Associate Dean for Academic Affairs from 2019 to 2024 and was an elevated as member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) in 2024.
Kirkwood has served as Chairman of the GSD Faculty Review Board and Academic Misconduct Panel and has served as a faculty member of the Harvard Medical School Center for Health and the Global Environment, the Harvard University Center for the Environment and a member of the faculty steering committee of The Harvard Global Health Institute. He served as the GSD representative on Harvard University’s Title IX Policy Review Advisory Committee and the Vice Provost for Advanced Learning’s (VPAL) Planning Council.
Externally, he has served as a member of the Advisory Board and External Examiner, Landscape Architecture Program, School of Architecture, Hong Kong University, External Examiner, Landscape Architecture Program, University of Toronto, a member of the On-Site External Examiners Review Committee to the School of Landscape Architecture, Beijing Forestry University, Beijing, China, a member of External Examiners, Landscape Architecture Program, School of Architecture, Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico, a member of Visiting Curriculum Committee to University of Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, Mexico and is currently a Beijing Foreign High-Level Talent Scholar at Tsinghua University (2024- 2025)
Kirkwood holds courtesy academic appointments including Distinguished Visiting Professor, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, Visiting Professor , International Program in Design and Architecture (INDA), Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand, Founding Professorship and Dean of Landscape Architecture, School of Civil Engineering and Architecture, Beijing University (BUCEA), Beijing, China, and is a Member of Academic Advisory Board of Beijing Advanced Innovation Center of Urban Design for Future Cities, Beijing, China. During Spring 2010 he was on sabbatical at Korea University, Seoul, Republic of Korea as a Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture. During Fall 2017, he was on sabbatical at Smith College, Northampton, MA. in the Landscape Studies Program as the William Allen Neilson Visiting Professor and during Fall 2024, he was on sabbatical at Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand, International Program in Design and Architecture, (INDA) as a Visiting Professor.
Kirkwood is currently a Member of International Editorial Board of Landscape Architecture Journal (2025- 2029) Editor of Nakhara: Journal of Environmental Design and Planning Bangkok, (2025-present), Deputy Editor in Chief of Landscape Architecture Journal (2020-2024), He was formerly Advisory Editor, (2015-2020, Beijing, China) was formerly Editor-in Chief of Nakhara: Journal of Environmental Design and Planning (2015-2018, Bangkok, Thailand), Managing Editor, Worldscape Magazine, Chief Editor, RISE Journal (2015- present, Seoul, Korea). His essays and articles on design research, practice, and teaching have been published in Landscape Architecture Magazine (USA), Landscape (UK), Journal of Chinese Landscape Architecture, Landscape Architecture Korea, Business World India, City Planning Review: Journal of City Planning Institute of Japan, Landscape Architecture Journal (China), Eco City and Green Building Journal, Landscape Record, China, Worldscape (China),Environment and Landscape Architecture of Korea, Urban Space Design (China), and Harvard Design Magazine.
He was elected a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects (FASLA) in 2009 and is an honorary Fellow of the Kew Guild, The Royal Gardens at Kew, England also in 2009. He was recognized for his global leadership in post-industrial regeneration and brownfields by an honorary Doctor of Science (DSc.) from the University of Ulster, Belfast, Northern Ireland in 2009.
He was elected a Member of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) and Architectural Registration Council of the United Kingdom (ARCUK) in 1978, an Associate Member of the Institute of Landscape Architects, United Kingdom (ILA) in 1988, a Member of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) in 1989 and was made a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects (FASLA) in 2009.
The scope of Kirkwood’s teaching, research, publishing and landscape consulting practice all emphasize a broader understanding of current and emerging technologies from landscape and environmental engineering, and how this understanding can best result in more creative and progressive design work in the fields of landscape architecture and planning and urban planning and design.
Kirkwood teaches core and option landscape design studios and offers lecture courses, workshops and seminars about design and aspects of technology in Landscape Architecture, Planning and Design.
Option design studios include: GSD 1413 Bangkok Remade: Design to Enhance Social Dignity, Climate Resilience, and Inspire the Nation’s Imagination in the Contemporary Thai Landscape, (2023) co-taught with Kotchakorn Voraakhom, GSD 1408 Ottawa County Remade: Toxic Transformations, Environmental Justice and Design Imagination, Ottawa County, North-East Oklahoma, USA (2022), GSD 1409 Tar Creek Remade: Environmental Legacies and Re-Imagining the Future of the Tar Creek Superfund Site, Tri-State Mining District, Ottawa County, Oklahoma, USA (2021), GSD 1408 Thailand Remade: The Lower Chao Phraya Flood Plain, Pathum Thani and the Technological Imagination, (2020) co-taught with Kotchakorn Voraakhom, GSD 1407 Fieldwork: Brexit, Borders and Imagining a New City-Region for the Irish Northwest (2019), co-taught with Gareth Doherty, GSD 1407 Korea Remade: Alternate Nature, DMZ and Hinterlands (2018) co-taught with Jungyoon Kim and Yoonjin Park, GSD 1409 Ulsan Remade: Manufacturing the Modern Industrial City- The Case of Ulsan, Republic of Korea, (2017), co-taught with Francesca Benedetto, GSD 1406 Seoul Remade: Design of the ‘Kool’ and the Everyday- Regeneration of the EBS District, Gangnam, Seoul, Republic of Korea (2016), GSD 1401 Mumbai Metropolitan: Adapting the Township Lands, Mumbai, India (2008) co-taught with Nazneen Cooper, GSD 1402 Mumbai Margins: Rethinking the Island City, Mumbai, India (2007) co-taught with Nazneen Cooper, GSD1402 Maximum Mumbai, Minimum Mumbai: Repositioning the Cotton Textile Mill Lands, Girangaon, Central Mumbai, India (2006), co-taught with Nazneen Cooper, GSD 1404 Altered Faces: Reworking the Teheran Corridor, Seoul, Korea (2004), co-taught with Alistair McIntosh, and GSD 1403 Motor City Landscapes: Detroit Riverfront (1999) co-taught with Mary Margaret Jones.
Landscape Core studio courses have included: GSD 1211 Landscape Architecture III and GSD 1211 Planning and Design of Landscapes
Lecture courses have included:GSD 6242 Ecologies, Techniques, Technologies IV, GSD 6323 Brownfield Practicum: Regeneration and Reuse of Brownfield Lands, GSD 6219 Plants and Technology II, GSD 6206 Landscape Technology, GSD 6442 Rebuilding Devastated Environments: Sustainable Landscape Development in the 21st Century, GSD 6304 Site-works, GSD 6303 Site Planning and GSD 2103 Drawing the Landscape.
Seminar courses have included: GSD 6454 Poetics of Landscape Construction, GSD 9108PHYTO Remediation and Rebuilding Technologies in the Landscape, GSD 9206 Mumbai Matters: Assembling Urban India, GSD 9206 Reimagining India: A New Urban Enterprise? GSD 3501 MLA IAP/MLA II Landscape Architecture Professional Seminar, GSD 6323 Brownfields: Sustainable Redevelopment of Brownfield Sites in Dorchester and East Boston, MA, GSD 6400 Landfill Enduse: Freshkills Landfill Regeneration, Staten Island, NY, GSD 6440 Land Reclamation and Remediation Technologies, GSD 6323 Advanced Seminar on Landscape Technology: Brownfields, GSD 6323 Manufactured Sites: Rethinking the Post-Industrial Landscape.
Professor Kirkwood studies technology and its relationship to landscape architecture through a series of research topics including the reuse of former industrial and polluted land, site remediation technologies, urban landscape planning and design, landscape reclamation, landscape detail design, traditional and emerging construction technologies and on-going weathering and durability of built landscapes related to climate change. He is a leading academic internationally in the field of site remediation, regeneration and recovery across a range of geographies, countries and scales of landscape. Areas of specific focus include mining extraction sites, urban and rural brownfields, waste landfills, the regeneration of superfund sites (USA), decommissioned military bases, closed manufacturing facilities and the invention and production of remade land using applied remediation technologies.
He is the co-founder with Professor Xiaodi Zheng of the Center for Brownfield Research at Tsinghua University, Beijing, P.R. China. He was also the founder and director of the Center for Environment and Technology (CTE), a research, advisory and executive education initiative located at the GSD. The CTE (1997-2017) focused on site analysis, remediation, sustainable reclamation issues, emerging landscape materials and educational design outreach in North America, Asia, Europe and the Middle East. Research projects included: Expo 2106 ‘City and Nature’ Regeneration Site Design, Tangshan, China; Urban Ireland: The City of Belfast as a Laboratory of Change; Dongchun New Town Housing Landscape, Korea; Hanam Misa Housing Landscape, Seoul, Korea; Post-mining reclamation strategies for the Pingshuo Mining Company, Shanxi, China; Vertical and Horizontal Moss Panel Surface Technologies with Il Song Landscape Research, Seoul, Korea; Strategies for development of the DMZ National Forest- ‘Forest of Peace’ for Ministry of Forestry, Korea; Zinc Smelting Plants Reuse in Monterrey and Chihuahua, Mexico with Grupo Diseno Urbano, Mexico City; Hiriya Landfill Reuse and Ayalon Park, Tel Aviv for District Planning Office, Tel Aviv and Beracha Foundation; Research on the low carbon city for the Mayor’s Office, Metropolitan Region of Seoul, Korea, an analysis and report on U-Eco Cities, for the Korea Institute of Construction & Transportation Technology Evaluation and Planning (KICTEP) and collaboration with MK Singh, (Delhi) and Samsung C&T Corporation, Engineering and Construction Group on sustainable design and development in Mumbai.
Prior to joining the Harvard faculty Kirkwood worked in private design offices in Scotland, UK, London, England, UK and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA carrying out urban land reclamation, landscape architectural design, urban architecture, and development projects in Europe, Middle East, and the U.S.A. These included Ardeer Quarry Restoration, and Saltcoats Landfill Reclamation, Ayrshire, Scotland, Canary Wharf, Phases 1- 3, London Docklands UK, Hotel del Artes, Vila Olimpica, Barcelona, Spain, Parc de le Draga, Banyoles, Spain, Kings Cross Redevelopment, London, UK. Chiswick Park, London, UK, Royal Albert Docks, London Docklands, Bishopsgate and Ludgate Developments, City of London, UK, Wexner Center, OSU Campus, Columbus, Ohio, the British Embassy and Chancellery, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and Colfes School Arts Center, Barnes, London, UK.
He was a project architect with the Office of Derek Lovejoy & Partners, Landscape Architects and Planners (now DLP), Edinburgh, Scotland and Trevor Dannatt & Partners, London, UK. He also worked as a senior associate of the landscape architecture office, Hanna/Olin Ltd, Philadelphia (now The Olin Studio, Inc.) consulting with the design offices of Eisenman and Robertson, New York, Foster Associates, London, UK, Richard Rogers Partnership, London, UK, Ove Arup & Partners, London, UK. Office of Frank O. Gehry, Los Angeles, Aldo Rossi, Milan. Italy, David Chipperfield, London, UK, Eric Parry, London, SOM, Chicago and London UK.
In addition Kirkwood has consulted for Weston & Sampson, Boston, MA (2016), Group Han, Seoul, Republic of Korea, (2014- present), Eastwood Design Company, Beijing, P.R. China (2006-2010), the Clean Land Fund, Rhode Island (2005-2012), District Planning Office, Tel Aviv and Beracha Foundation on Hiriya Landfill, (2001), Fresh Kills Regeneration Professional Advisory Forum, (2001), City of New York Department of City Planning on Freshkills Landfill (1999-2001), and US EPA Region 1, New England (2000).
Jonathan Grinham
On leave for Fall 2025
Jonathan Grinham is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. His research brings an intensely interdisciplinary approach to climate change and the built environment, connecting material science with building science and design to examine questions on materiality, thermal health, and lifecycle carbon emissions. These questions have sparked the development of novel technologies, publications, patents, and a start-up company, Trellis Air Corporation, that deliver low-carbon climate solutions through material innovation. Jonathan is a Faculty Associate with the Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities, the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability, and the Aizenberg Lab at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. He holds degrees in architecture and building science from Virginia Tech and a Doctor of Design degree from the Harvard GSD.
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.
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.
Jennifer Bonner
Jennifer Bonner is Associate Professor of Architecture at Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Bonner founded MALL in 2009, a creative practice that stands for Mass Architectural Loopty Loops or Maximum Arches with Limited Liability—an acronym with built-in flexibility.
Born in Alabama, Bonner is a recipient of the 2021 United States Artist Fellowship, Architectural League Prize for Young Architects + Designers, Emerging Voices Award (AIA/ Young Architects Forum), Progressive Architecture (P/A) Award and Next Progressives (Architect Magazine). Her creative work has been published in architectural trade publications including Architectural Review, Metropolis, Gray, Azure and Wallpaper*, as well as, more experimental journals including a+t , DAMN, PLAT, Offramp, Room One Thousand, Flat Out and MAS Context. She is the co-editor of Blank: Speculations on CLT (with H.Kara), author of A Guide to the Dirty South: Atlanta, faculty editor of Platform: Still Life, and guest editor for ART PAPERS special issue on architecture and design of Los Angeles. Bonner has exhibited work at the Royal Institute of British Architects, National Building Museum, WUHO gallery, HistoryMIAMI, Yve YANG gallery, pinkcomma gallery, Armstrong Gallery at Kent State, Yale Architecture Gallery, Istanbul Modern Museum, Boston’s Rose Kennedy Greenway, and the Chicago Architecture Biennial.
Bonner received a Bachelor of Architecture from Auburn University and a Master of Architecture from Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where she was awarded the James Templeton Kelley Prize for her project Assemblage of Twins. Her undergraduate thesis project, the Cedar Pavilion, was designed and constructed at the Rural Studio in Perry County, Alabama and received an AR Award for Emerging Architecture (2005).
Bonner was the first recipient of an annual teaching fellowship at Woodbury University in Los Angeles and held the position of TVSDesign Distinguished Studio Critic at Georgia Institute of Technology. Previously, she has also taught design studios and seminars at Auburn University, the Architectural Association, and Lund University. Bonner worked in the office of Foster + Partners in London and Istanbul on the Palace of Peace in Astana, Kazakhstan. Later as Project Architect at David Chipperfield Architects she worked on design proposals for Melnikov’s Bakhmetevsky Bus Garage in Moscow and the Turner Contemporary in Margate, UK.
Anita Berrizbeitia
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 electives curriculum.
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 Harvard University Graduate School of Design. She was awarded the Prince Charitable Trusts Rome Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome in 2006.
Silvia Benedito
Sílvia Benedito is a registered landscape architect and architect from Portugal. She has been teaching in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design since 2011. Benedito teaches graduate core design studios in landscape architecture and urbanism dedicated to vulnerable territories and communities subject to climatic degradation. She also develops advanced research seminars on micro-climatic simulations and bioclimatic design strategies for integrated built environments, including active collaborations with communities, local governments, and NGOs. Committed to the production and reception of atmosphere, Benedito’s research and practice simultaneously examines the making of micro-climates for human and environmental health under the current challenges of anthropogenic disturbances.
In her methods for landscape architecture and urbanism the concept and space of atmosphere claim the body in multiple scopes and scales—from large ecological networks to smaller open space interventions; from urban neighborhoods to rural territories. Claiming that landscape is as much about air and atmosphere as it is about land and water offers a stimulating dimension to these disciplines, reconciling ecological imperatives with community delight and well-being. Her last book Atmosphere Anatomies: On Design, Weather, and Sensation (Lars Müller, 2021) examines weather as design substance at the disciplinary intersection of landscape, architecture, and planning. Here, she examines paradigmatic design examples and corresponding thermodynamic phenomena operating at micro and macro scales for thermal delight and energy optimization. This book received the inaugural Book Prize for Architectural innovation and Sustainability by the Portuguese League of Architects and the Minister for the Environment and Climate Action. Her previous co-edited book Thermodynamic Interactions: An Exploration into Physiological, Material, and Territorial Atmospheres (ACTAR, 2016) was awarded the III Spanish Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism Prize in the Research Category, Spain. Benedito’s design work and research has been recognized by various institutions, including the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies, MacDowell Colony for the Arts, Foundation of Science and Technology, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, and the Portuguese League of Architects with the Fernando Távora Prize. Benedito Benedito was a Guest Professor at the Technische Universität München, in the Department of Landscape Architecture (Fakultät für Architektur). She also held a Guest Professorship at the Technische Universität Graz, at the Institute of Architecture and Landscape, and, more recently, she was the Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Waterloo, Canada
Benedito received a degree in Architecture from the University of Coimbra, a degree in Music from the Conservatory of Coimbra, and a master’s degree in Urban Design from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. A former Senior Associate at James Corner Field Operations (NYC), where she led many public and private urban design and small-scale public projects, Benedito co-founded OFICINAA, an architecture, landscape and urban design practice based in Ingolstadt, Germany. OFICINAA has received several international awards and mentions: finalist for the PS1 MoMA Young Architects Program (2018, USA), first prize for Peterborough’s Riverfront Park (2017, USA), third prize for the Riverfront re-naturalization competition, Ingolstadt (2016, Germany), Finalist for Europan 11 Competition (2013, Germany), First prize for Ingobräu Landscape Masterplan and Housing Development (2011, Germany), Olympic Village Landscape Masterplan competition pre-selected entry for Munich’s 2018 Olympic Winter Games Bid (2010, Germany), First Prize for Europan 10 competition (2010, Portugal), and First prize for Europan 9 (2008, Portugal). The work has been published and recognized in various venues and institutions, including the Architekturgalerie München, the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, the Museum of Moderna Art in NYC (MoMA), Drucker Design Gallery at Harvard GSD, and at the Venice Architecture Biennial.