Nicholas Pevzner

M.L.A. University of Pennsylvania (2009)
B.Arch. Cooper Union (2005)

Nicholas Pevzner is an Assistant Professor in the department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning at UPenn’s Weitzman School of Design, and is a Faculty Fellow at UPenn's Kleinman Center for Energy Policy. His research spans across the topics of ecological systems, energy landscapes, and climate policy. Grounded in a socio-ecological framework, his work focuses on ecological systems and their integration into design, and energy systems and their integration into culturally contested landscapes. His teaching and research look for opportunities for decarbonization across sectors, investigating the impacts of climate policy on physical built environment, on cultural attitudes, and on implications for spatial justice.

He teaches design studios, as well as courses on urban ecology, urban design, and the history of energy systems. He recently taught a series of studios looking at the wildfire threat in the American West, that explored the intersection of fire, forestry, jobs, and carbon.

Recent Work:

Renewable Energy Landscapes

• Rebecca O’Neil, Danielle Preziuso, Katie Arkema, Yekang Ko, Nicholas Pevzner, Kirk Dimond, Simon Gore, Katherine Morrice, Chris Henderson, Devyn Powell. “Renewable Energy Landscapes: Designing place-based infrastructure for scale.” Pacific Northwest National Laboratories (White Paper), July 2022.
• Nicholas Pevzner. Yekang Ko, Kirk Dimond “Power Player: Designing for Just and Multifunctional Energy Landscapes.” Landscape Architecture Magazine, January 2020.
• Hanna K. Szumilas-Kowalczyk and Nicholas Pevzner. “Getting Beyond Visual Impact: Designing Renewable Energy as a Positive Landscape Addition,” Proceedings of the 2019 Visual Resource Stewardship Conference, Argonne National Laboratory, Lemont, IL, October 2019.
• Nicholas Pevzner. “Energy,” In Richard Weller, ed., The Landscape Architecture Project (San Francisco: ORO Editions), 2023.
• Nicholas Pevzner. “Speculative Designs for Energy Democracy.” Scenario Journal, Issue 7, January 2020.

Urban Infrastructure

• Stephanie Carlisle and Nicholas Pevzner. “Mongolian Energy Futures: Repowering Ulaanbaatar.” Kleinman Center for Energy Policy (Report). October 2019.
• Nicholas Pevzner. "Infrastructural Ecology: The City's Buried Systems." Places Journal (Reading List). February 2018.
• 3-part Urban Omnibus series, A Methane Primer: .
  • Nicholas Pevzner. “Gas Flows Below.” Urban Omnibus, September 12, 2018.
  • Nicholas Pevzner. “Buried Grudges.” Urban Omnibus, October 11, 2018. 
  • Nicholas Pevzner. “Pipeline Territories.” Urban Omnibus, November 28, 2018.
• Stephanie Carlisle and Nicholas Pevzner. “The Performative Ground, rediscovering the deep section.” Scenario Journal, Issue 2, Spring 2012.

Urban Ecology, Extraction, and Climate

• Max R. Piana, Nicholas Pevzner & Richard A. Hallett. “Beyond the axe: interdisciplinary approaches towards an urban silviculture.” Journal of Landscape Architecture, 2023.
• Robert I. McDonald, Myla F. J. Aronson, Timothy Beatley, Erin Beller, Micaela Bazo, Robin Grossinger, Kelsey Jessup, Andressa V. Mansur, José Antonio Puppim de Oliveira, Stephanie Panlasigui, Joe Burg, Nicholas Pevzner, Danielle Shanahan, Lauren Stoneburner, Andrew Rudd, Erica Spotswood, “Denser and greener cities: Green interventions to achieve both urban density and nature.” People and Nature, Volume 5, Issue 1, February 2023.
• Stephanie Carlisle and Nicholas Pevzner. “The Thin Thread of Carbon,” in Space Caviar, ed., Non-Extractive Architecture, Volume 1: On Designing Without Depletion (London: Sternberg Press, 2021).
• Stephanie Carlisle and Nicholas Pevzner. “Commodifying the Urban Forest.” DOMUS, April 2019.
• Stephanie Carlisle and Nicholas Pevzner. “Eating the Crust: Landscapes of extraction and global mining.” DOMUS, March 2019.
• Stephanie Carlisle and Nicholas Pevzner. “Designing Urban Ecosystems: Collaboration & the Interdisciplinary Imperative.” ACSA Conference, Denver Colorado. March 2018.

Landscape and the Green New Deal

• Nicholas Pevzner. “Landscape, Public Imagination, and the Green New Deal.” Landscape Architecture Magazine, July 2019.
• Nicholas Pevzner. “Green New Futures,” Ground Up Issue 09: ONWARD (Berkeley, CA: Edition One Books, 2020).
   

Scenario Journal (Co-Editor)

www.scenariojournal.com

Scenario Journal is an open-access nonprofit digital publication that showcases interdisciplinary conversations between design and ecology. It seeks to be a free and accessible platform for bringing together work from practitioners, academics and students of landscape, planning, architecture, engineering, art, and environmental science. Every issue tackles a current topic from a diversity of disciplinary viewpoints. Scenario Journal is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.

                                    Scenario 7: Power, Winter 2020

                                    Scenario 6: Migration, Summer 2017

                                    Scenario 5: Extraction, Fall 2015

                                    Scenario 4: Building the Urban Forest, Spring 2014

                                    Scenario 3: Rethinking Infrastructure, Spring 2013

                                    Scenario 2: Performance, Spring 2012