Two projects from students in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Department of City & Regional Planning have been recognized by The American Society of Landscape Architecture (ASLA) with 2022 student honor awards. Their designs propose an immersive experience for visitors to the wetlands along the Anacostia River in Washington, D.C., and a sustainable housing solution for a landscape-prone site in Puerto Rico. The awards represent the highest recognition of future landscape architects.
Photo Lou Caltabiano
Three years after the WRT team led by Charles Neer (MLA’99) produced a new master plan for FDR Park, some of the landscape and architectural design is taking shape, offering new features for people and other species.
Outdoor sport and physical exercise have had considerable impact on how we design, live in, and understand landscapes. A new book, Landscapes for Sport: Histories of Physical Exercise, Sport, and Health (Harvard University Press, 2022), edited by Professor of Landscape Architecture Sonja Dümpelmann, focuses on outdoor spaces that have been designed, built, and used for physical exercise and various competitive and non-competitive sports since the early modern period. In an excerpt, she suggests the relevance and meanings of sport landscapes, which are frequently overlooked and taken for granted, despite constituting significant areas of open space in and outside our cities.
In a new book from Island Press, Managing the Climate Crisis, Jonathan Barnett, professor of practice emeritus of city and regional planning, and Matthijs Bouw, professor of practice in landscape architecture and McHarg Center Fellow for Risk and Resilience, share their approach to addressing the inevitable and growing threats from the climate crisis using constructed and nature-based design and engineering and ordinary government programs.
Photo: Frederick Steiner
Visiting the Alaskan coast by boat after a hiatus of more than 40 years, Dean Steiner reflects on changes in the landscape and the lessons to be learned in terms of biodiversity and cultural heritage.
The Environmental Modeling Lab (EMLab), a newly launched research unit within The Ian L.
Photo: Morondava Autrement
Among the various transformations taking place on Planet Earth are the distinct but overlapping crises of anthropogenic climate change, mass extinction of plants and animals, and the steady expansion of urbanized space.
In the latest effort from Bird-Friendly Penn, a campus-wide initiative to make Penn more hospitable, Weitzman students are invited to create signage for Penn buildings to help birds steer clear and minimize the fatal collisions that are now commonplace.
Richard Weller, professor and chair of landscape architecture, co-executive director of The Ian L.
Douglas Robb, a researcher in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia, has been named the inaugural McHarg Fellow. Awarded by The Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology at Penn, the McHarg Fellowship provides $75,000 to support an emerging voice in landscape architecture and its related fields who would benefit most from support to conduct research, to teach, and to be mentored by faculty over the term of the fellowship.
Field Notes Toward an Internationalist Green New Deal, from The Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology, is “intended to open new terrains for scholarship, organizing, contestation, and struggle in the fight for a globally just Green New Deal.” The site hosts data and visualizations on topics including deforestation, mass extinction, oil and gas reserves, international development, and global carceral infrastructure.
Photo Huiyi An
A new initiative at Weitzman called Studio+ brings together faculty members and students in architecture, landscape architecture, historic preservation, fine arts, and city planning to elevate and reimagine the role of public-school buildings in collaboration with several West Philadelphia schools. “What we’re trying to do is propose new interventions to the problem of school facilities in Philadelphia,” Assistant Professor of City Planning Akira Drake Rodriguez says.