Shannon Nichol: Good Problems

Since co-founding the Seattle-based landscape architecture firm GGN in 1999, Shannon Nichol has brought a love of engaging with design problems – spatial, functional, social, and qualitative – to her projects and leadership of GGN’s culture.

Not knowing, learning, testing, failing, and even struggling to manage one’s own thoughts (as well as those of others), compose a central part of this design mindset, as well as the need to constantly question oneself. Shannon’s talk will use project-process examples from her 22 years with GGN to focus on this humble, personal core of designing and solving important problems we encounter as landscape architects. Shannon will share drawings, diagrams, and other problem-solving tools used to shape several of GGN’s key projects.

This talk will have the student or young professional especially in mind. In an era of increasingly formalized education, high expectations for perfection, low-risk and replicated designs, and auto-generated content, it can seem overwhelming – or even alarming – for a landscape architect to first encounter the expectation of individual intellectual ownership and self-generated risk and design at a practice like GGN.

Landscape architects are positioned to more deeply and meaningfully influence many aspects of our built, natural, and cultural environments, but we each need to be more active and inventive at every level of our work to create real change. Shannon will talk about how (re)embracing the designer’s pleasurable mindset toward problem-solving can be an empowering tool for addressing even the most grim issues in our projects.

A continuously self-educating, inventive, and experimental mindset is embraced by Nichol and her colleagues at GGN, as well as an embrace of confusion, failure, and difficulty in each process. Design is not a trivial infatuation with the aesthetic but is a wonderful way to use maximum creativity and logic to test, fail, and structure our actions. This empowers us to deeply engage with and manipulate our sites in charismatic and artistic ways that can intuitively and objectively solve multiple problems at once.

About Shannon Nichol

Shannon Nichol is a founding partner of GGN. Nichol's designs - including Millennium Park’s Lurie Garden, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Campus, and Boston’s North End Parks - are widely recognized for being deeply embedded in their neighborhoods and locally native ecologies. Recent and current projects include India Basin Shoreline Park, the Burke Museum of Natural History & Culture, Oxbow Farm & Conservation Center, and the Seattle Residence: Native Gardens. 

Nichol is a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects and an honorary member of the American Institute of Architects (Seattle). She and her partners received the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award for Landscape Architecture in 2011, and GGN was the recipient of the 2017 ASLA National Landscape Architecture Firm Award. Nichol's projects have been recognized with ASLA National Awards of Excellence, ASLA and AIA Honor Awards, Tucker Design Awards, and Great Places Awards from the Environmental Design Research Association. 

Throughout her career, Nichol has consistently engaged in a wide range of volunteer and educational activities. Her most recent guest lectures have included Cornell University, Harvard Graduate School of Design, and the Washington Native Plant Society. Nichol delivered the Sasaki Day Key Note Lecture at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2017, and she and Jennifer Guthrie were the Glimcher Distinguished Visiting Professors at Ohio State’s Knowlton School in 2015. Nichol's work has been exhibited at several university galleries, and she has also contributed to important design publications, including A+U Magazine and Representing Landscapes: Analogue edited by Nadia Amoroso. Reflecting her longtime advocacy for restoring both native plants and walkable streets into contemporary life, Shannon currently serves on the board of directors for Oxbow Farm & Conservation Center and Seattle Neighborhood Greenways.

 

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.