In a collaboration with the Hopi of Arizona, students learn to listen to the land and channel the community’s aspirations.
A cooling pavilion and trail head designed by Master of Landscape Architecture student Baoying Liu
The Hopi have continuously inhabited northeastern Arizona for nearly 1,000 years, making and remaking the landscape of the 1.5 million-acre tribal reservation there. Last semester, a group of Master of Landscape Architecture students traveled to the Hopi First Mesa Consolidated Villages in Northeast Arizona to learn about their landscape practices, and to help illustrate the community’s visions for restoration of the land.
The studio was led by Ellen Neises, a landscape architect and associate professor of practice who has worked with indigenous groups around the US for years. More than a decade ago Neises began collaborating with Fred Phillips, a landscape architect who has carried out a series of restoration projects with tribal communities in Arizona, Colorado, Texas and northern New Mexico since the late 1990s. Phillips has periodically lectured to Neises’s students at Penn. Last year, he and Neises developed a studio course at Weitzman to advance a multi-phase public space and ecological revitalization project Phillips’s firm is working on with the Hopi.
Guided by the community’s aspirations, the work includes an ambitious set of improvements to the Pongsikya, also known as Keams Canyon, and the villages of First Mesa that includes developing a park and trails, restored waterways and vegetation, and economic and cultural development. That scope is typical of Phillips’s practice, which has included multi-phase restoration projects in the southwest driven by indigenous communities’ vision for their land. Phillips began working with tribal communities as a young landscape architecture student at Purdue University, and has spent his career helping to bring landscape design, planning, and funding to native-led projects.
“I felt that native wisdom and philosophy should be a guiding light for landscape architecture,” Phillips says. “It’s really about listening to the land, seeing what’s there and understanding what was there, and having that guide your practice.”
Max Taylor leads students on a site visit at the Hopi First Mesa Consolidated Villages in the fall of 2025.
Students began the semester researching Hopi history and culture, analyzing geological and climatic conditions, and developing design ideas tied to Hopi material objects, from baskets to textiles and tools. They visited the First Mesa—the easternmost of three mesas that mark the area —in October and learned directly from residents, who showed them spaces of cultural importance and areas of degradation. Much of the landscape in the Hopi nation is defined by cycles of drought and flash flooding, with eroded slopes and streambanks. Max Taylor, a Hopi ethnobotanist, showed them the region’s plant life, highlighting agricultural practices in riparian areas, relying more on snowmelt and rainfall than irrigation or groundwater.
“We touched plants and smelled plants and kind of introduced them that way. That’s one of my teaching tools—that you get familiar with these plants by the feel and smell of them,” Taylor says. “In the Hopi culture these plants are always waiting for you. They’re part of our food systems and they’re waiting for us to harvest.”
Students also learned about residents’ ideas for recreational amenities and economic development, including spaces to sell art and handmade goods.
“A lot of our projects and ideas changed after we visited the Hopi,” says Brenton Shenen Cai, a third-year Master of Landscape Architecture student. “That was a turning point for a lot of us.”
Cai’s project involved planning a trail system traversing the Hopi lands and adjacent areas. The goal was to develop and highlight the “didactic landscape,” Cai says, zeroing in on elements that illustrate how the land evolves in response to climate and weather. One element he proposed was a curvilinear earthwall that would capture water and sediment, reflecting wind conditions. The structure would be marked with holes so that repeat visitors could monitor the buildup, and the erosion of the wall itself, over time. It was valuable experience, Cai says, developing a large-scale, flexible plan in response to the community’s needs.
The immersive trail experience during the monsoon designed by Master of Landscape Architecture student Brenton Cai
Adaptability was a priority for the students. Adrian Marcelo Casas, a third-year Master of Landscape Architecture student, proposed a series of simple retaining walls, stairs, and mounds that could slow water. The proposals were developed as a menu of options that people could use for a variety of purposes, such as re-establishing native vegetation, using materials like rocks, branches, and soil that were readily available.
“The idea was not to impose something. The idea was to listen to the community and make strategies that they can adapt or make with their own hands,” Casas says. “A lot of my proposals came from what they were teaching us.”
Community-based studios in landscape architecture and planning often focus on problem areas or challenges to overcome, says Neises, who is also the Lori Kanter Tritsch Executive Director at PennPraxis, the applied research and community engagement arm of the Weitzman School of Design. There are challenges in the Hopi landscape that students applied their skills to addressing, but residents were more interested in emphasizing areas of opportunity, she says. That gave students a chance to help animate community ideas and integrate them into the existing landscape context. In early 2026, Neises and one or two students hope to return to the First Mesa with Fred to share their ideas and participate in a community conversation about the projects people are most interested in continuing to develop and implement.
“Figuring out how landscape architectural design can elevate and enrich a cultural landscape is one of the most interesting challenges for us,” Neises says. “We gain a lot, and what we hope we give [the Hopi] is some really nice tools for conversations about possible trajectories.”
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