The McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology announces the selection of the 2025-2026 McHarg Fellow, Tami Banh.
Banh is a Vietnamese architect and landscape architect based in New York City. Her work explores ways of restructuring relationships between people and the environment through design, building, writing, and making. Focused on critical representation, climate resilience, and human / more-than-human cohabitation, her research and practice engage with landscapes at the intersection of ecology, infrastructure, and community resilience.
Banh’s current research project, “Shared Waters, Divided Landscapes,” explores how cultural landscapes, governance frameworks, and ecological practices shape the Mekong River across national boundaries, examining how policies, traditional knowledge, and representations of the river influence its physical and cultural transformations. Through field and archival research, comparative study, and community engagement, the work explores alternative frameworks for understanding and designing within contested and dynamic waterscapes.
Previously, as an Associate at SCAPE Landscape Architecture, Banh has led and supported public landscape infrastructure projects that integrate placemaking, ecological design, and social impact such as Living Breakwaters and Hudson Highlands Fjord Trail. She also served as an Associate Adjunct Professor in the Urban Design program at Columbia University and has worked at SHoP and ZGF Architects. Banh holds a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Southern California and a Master of Architecture and Master of Landscape Architecture with Distinction from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design.
Banh will follow 2024-2025 McHarg Fellow, Leah Kahler, who will present the culmination of a year of teaching and research in a public talk on Thursday, April 24 at 6:30pm in the Upper Gallery of Meyerson Hall. Kahler’s research and spring seminar “Clones, Zones, and Migrants” explore the socioecological legacies and implications of the plantation landscape and the American nursery industry, focused on sites of labor, extraction, and production.
The McHarg Fellowship is a teaching and research award given by the McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology to an emerging voice in landscape architecture. The purpose of the Fellowship is to create a unique opportunity for an emerging professional and/or academic who would benefit most from support to conduct research, to teach, and to be mentored by faculty during the term of the Fellowship. The Fellowship is awarded competitively on an annual basis and the selected fellow is expected to be in residence at Penn full-time for one academic year.
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