Michelle Delk: Snøhetta Landscapes

Michelle Delk, the Laurie Olin Professor of Practice in Landscape Architecture at Penn and partner with Snøhetta in New York City, will deliver the inaugural Anne Whiston Spirn Lecture. Delk’s lecture, Snøhetta Landscapes, will focus on her recent work with the firm, where she leads the landscape architecture practice in the Americas.

Delk’s work is evocative of a foundational premise shared with Snøhetta: to create places that enhance the positive relationships between people and their environments. Both aspirational and pragmatic, she seeks to discover and expand the urban landscape vernacular, striving to express the subtleties of place through the incongruities of memory, envi­ronment, and social perceptions. Delk is a Fellow with the American Society of Landscape Architects, a board member with New York’s Urban Design Forum, and a member of the Cultural Landscape Foundation Stewardship Council.

The Anne Whiston Spirn Lecture is presented annually by The Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology to showcase a practitioner or scholar in the field of landscape architecture whose work expands the disciplinary boundaries of research and practice. Housed in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design, The McHarg Center was launched in 2019 as a transdisciplinary platform for collaborative research supporting the future of life on Earth. The lecture honors Anne Whiston Spirn (MLA’74), a Penn alumna who led the Department of Landscape Architecture as chair from 1986-1994 and whose work inspires deeper engagements with people and planet.

If you require any accessibility accommodation, such as live captioning, audio description, or a sign language interpreter, please email news@design.upenn.edu. Please note, we require at least five (5) business days’ notice.