Catherine Seavitt Nordenson | Forest Politics: Positioning the Amazon

The Department of Landscape Architecture welcomes Catherine Seavitt Nordenson as part of its Landscape Now lecture series. 

Seavitt’s talk will explore past and present “forest politics” in Brazil’s Amazon basin by examining questions of sovereignty, borders, and infrastructural networks. She will discuss role of the modernist landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx and his political defense of the Amazon basin, which had been long defined (albeit incorrectly) by the Brazilian state as a demographic void: a great emptiness to be filled. Burle Marx’s prescient assertion over fifty years ago remains a clarion call today: “The sacrifice of nature is irreversible.”

Catherine Seavitt Nordenson, FASLA, AIA is a professor and director of the graduate landscape architecture program at the Spitzer School of Architecture, City College of New York. A registered architect and landscape architect, she is a graduate of the Cooper Union and Princeton University, a fellow of the American Academy in Rome, and a recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship for research in Brazil. Her work explores adaptation to climate change in urban environments and the novel transformation of landscape restoration practices. She also examines the intersection of political power, environmental activism, and public health, particularly as seen through the design of equitable public space and policy. Her books include Depositions: Roberto Burle Marx and Public Landscapes under Dictatorship (University of Texas Press, 2018); Structures of Coastal Resilience (Island Press, 2018); Waterproofing New York (Urban Research Press, 2016); and On the Water: Palisade Bay (Hatje Cantz, 2010). Her essays have been published widely, including the journals Architectural Review, Artforum, Avery Review, Harvard Design Magazine, JoLA, LA+, Landscape Architecture Magazine, and Topos.

If you require any accessibility accommodation, such as live captioning, audio description, or a sign language interpreter, please email news@design.upenn.edu to let us know what you need. Please note, we require at least 48 hours’ notice. If you register within 48 hours of this event, we won’t be able to secure the appropriate accommodations.