Noa Mori Machover

Hometown: Waltham, Massachusetts
Education Background: B.A. in Urban Design, Brown University, 2019 (Transferred from MIT halfway through, where I studied Architecture and Materials Science)

How did you get interested in your field?
I originally was drawn to architecture as a field that synthesizes making, technical problem solving, aesthetics, and social/cultural studies. But in most of my architecture studios in undergrad, I realized I was more interested in the site’s context, history, and resource flows than I was in the design of buildings. I learned about Landscape Architecture towards the end of my studies and realized that was probably a good fit for me. I joined the Fine Arts program as a dual student after my first semester at Penn. I was really looking to expand the kinds of questions and mediums I could work with, and Penn’s MFA is so incredibly open-ended and interdisciplinary and has been such a generative home to develop my practice.

What was your background prior to coming to Penn?
I began my undergraduate studies at MIT where I majored in Materials Science and Engineering and Architecture. I transferred to Brown after two years to pursue a deeper integration of arts, humanities, and technical studies, ultimately designing my own major in Urban Design. I graduated in December 2019 and lived in Providence for two and a half years, where I held many odd jobs ranging from residential gardening, architectural design and fabrication, website design and programming, youth design-build nonprofit administration, and social media manager for a therapist. I also pursued some grant-funded creative projects and attended an artist residency in rural Finland.

Why did you choose Penn?
The Landscape Architecture and Fine Arts programs at Penn are full of extraordinary students and faculty, and the theoretical and practical concerns of both departments are really well-suited to my interests in landscape urbanism, emergence, infrastructure, repair, interspecies relations, and material knowledge.  Additionally, I have always been curious about Philadelphia and was excited to live here. I was also lucky to be offered a scholarship that made my attendance extremely affordable, and it was hard to say no!

What has been your favorite class so far?
Hard to choose! I’m going to pick two because I’m in two programs ;)

In Landscape Architecture, the third Media course in the core curriculum, “the cartographic imagination,” with Robert Gerard Pietrusko. I learned so much about technical mapping tools, but also about how to make compelling and beautiful visuals that are impactful and meaningful.

In Fine Arts, I loved “Across Forms: Art and Writing” with Sharon Hayes and Syd Zolf. We were exposed to brilliant artists who work with language, which expanded both how I make art and how I relate to words. The class was structured through a series of “critshops,” borrowing from both the critique format common to fine arts and workshop structures used in developing writing.

What are you learning right now that will help you in the future?
I’m currently developing a long-term research-based body of work and presenting it across both departments of Landscape Architecture and Fine Arts. It’s extremely self-directed and interdisciplinary, and I often feel very unsure about where it’s going. I feel so grateful to be able to dig deep into my research interests and I think it’ll be so important in the future to have knowledge of my own creative process. It’s also been challenging but gratifying to try to make work that resonates across multiple disciplines. It can be difficult as the disciplines sometimes have different concerns, but this is ultimately the work I hope to be doing, and I am so glad to have incredible mentors here helping me to find my path.

What do you like best about Philadelphia?
I felt very able to quickly find community within the city, and the art/cultural scene is both large enough that there are always new and interesting things happening, but also small and intimate enough that it feels accessible. There are many people in Philadelphia who deeply love and are invested in this city, and I think that’s so important. It helps the city feel less transient since there are so many deeply rooted community-based projects that existed before I came here, and will exist far into the future.

What kinds of activities and/or organizations are you involved in?
I’m a founder and organizer of Upstream, a publishing collective run by students at Weitzman and other programs at Penn, as well as Philadelphia community members. I’m also a member of EnviroLab which is a graduate workgroup based in the Department of Anthropology at Penn, focused on ethnographic research on environment-society relations. I was previously a research assistant at the McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology, where I was studying global landscape transformations happening alongside the green energy transition.

What are your career ambitions?
My dream is to be able to work across art, landscape, and academia. I’d love to be involved in teaching, writing, making artworks, and working on cross-disciplinary landscape and environmental projects.