THE CLASS OF 2025
“Knowledge doesn’t always happen in the rational frame,” says Master of Architecture and Master of Landscape Architecture candidate Kelvin Vu, who was a professional dancer before coming to Weitzman. (Photo Kait Privitera)
Kelvin Vu took a unique path to studying design. While pursuing an Environmental Studies degree as an undergraduate at Yale, an Introduction to Architecture course piqued his interest. He took a design discovery program in landscape at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, but returned to his first love: dance. Upon graduating from the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance under the direction of Summer Lee Rhatigan, he got what he describes as his dream job: a role as a dancer in the Young Ensemble of Batsheva Dance Company in Tel Aviv. A year there turned into six.
Fast forward to spring of 2025, and Vu is set to graduate from Weitzman with a dual Master of Architecture and Master of Landscape Architecture degree. The four-year accelerated program has taught him how the history and theory of architecture informs landscape architecture, and vice versa. But he hasn't forgotten about his past in the performing arts. “My education at SFCD was intensely physical and intellectual at the same time,” Vu recalls.
“Both dance and landscape design are about change, flux, and dynamism,” he says. “To really seriously grapple with landscape, you have to consider the body.”
Vu in rehearsal for TMITBD, a dance work based on the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown in rural Pennsylvania (Photos Kait Privitera)
For Vu, those bodies are not just human bodies, but can also include animal and plant bodies. Building on his love for the outdoors and all things ecological, he has taken inspiration from theoretical frameworks such as Lawrence and Anna Halprin’s collaborative work, Donna Haraway’s interspecies thinking and Michael Marder and Anaïs Tondeur’s writing on the philosophy and metaphysics of plants, which offer non-traditional thinking about both landscape and technology
“Like these authors’ work, my experience in dance has made it clear that there are many ways to think outside of traditional modes,” Vu says. “Knowledge doesn’t always happen in the rational frame.”
For his final act at Weitzman, Vu has choreographed and designed a performance open to the Penn community that will take place May 11-13 in the Duhring Wing Gallery. Titled TMITBD, it is part of his independent fourth-year studio, and is based on the infamous Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown in rural Pennsylvania. It features collage, chronographs, diagrams, animated drawings, and other ambient, time-based media. Vu and other cast members will perform inside a two-walled room facing the audience.
“This was a big moment in American history as well as the history of landscape,” Vu says, who was advised by Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture Robert Gerard Pietrusko and Catherine Seavitt, Meyerson Professor and chair of landscape architecture. “My thesis investigates the controversial ways in which the history of Three Mile Island has been constructed through the body and the surrounding landscape.”
“It’s unsurprising that he has drawn on the idea of embodied learning, indeed using his own body as a tool,” says Seavitt. “His explorations in landscape architecture have drawn from the idea of the score, movement, the physical body, and the labor of that body–and how all of this knowledge has the capacity to shape both space and emotion.”
For Vu, the freedom to combine seemingly divergent ideas in a supportive environment is the most important part of the dual degree program at Weitzman. “It gives you some critical distance from the rhetoric of both disciplines,” he says. “They complement each other, and it makes it a rich experience to switch back and forth."
The dual degree program has helped bridge the gap for Vu. He explains that architecture has helped him understand how things go together, and landscape design allows him to move through scales, from the cosmos to the elemental. It also deals with social and ecological systems. “Landscape architects and architects have different ways of thinking and can be in opposition. I can be a translator,” he says.
A design by Vu and Jenna Selati (MArch'24,MLA'24) for a second-year architecture studio with Daniel Markiewicz
Vu is one of just six dual degree students at Weitzman set to graduate this month. They include Eissa Nawaf Attar (Master of City Planning and Master of Fine Arts); Mariya Viktorivna Lupandina (Master of City Planning and Master of Landscape Architecture); Andreína S Sojo Faria (Master of Architecture and Master of Landscape Architecture); Yanjie Zhang (Master of Architecture and Master of Science in Historic Preservation); and Yixuan Zhou (Master of Landscape Architecture and Master of Urban Spatial Analytics).
Associate Professor of Practice Daniel Markiewicz oversaw Vu’s second year architecture studio project—a bathhouse on an open, green site. The project was a collaboration with Jenna Selati, an MLA-MArch student who graduated last year. “Kelvin really developed a landscape scheme that complemented his architectural project,” Markiewicz says. “The dual degree students are all very mature and they are self-directed while also open to learning and pushing the boundaries.”
Markiewicz was also impressed with Vu’s proactive role in organizing the “Culture of Care” committee, which organized a town hall and initiated positive cultural change in the department. “Kelvin brought ideas to the table from the landscape department to architecture, the two of which can be a little siloed at times.”
The expedited degree allows participants to get both their architecture and landscape architecture degrees in four years, rather than six, if pursued independently, but the extra space is often helpful for students. The first year of the dual degree track is the first year of the architecture program, and the second is the first year of landscape. After that, studios alternate between departments by semester, while electives can be taken across the school.
Vu has leveraged his combined architecture and landscape experience into a job summer internship near Boston, where he is from. He will be working for Agency Landscape and Planning in Cambridge, where he is excited to work on everything from public landscapes to research, advocacy and community engagement.
What is Vu ultimately looking for?
“In the end,” he says, “I just want to be working with fun people and swimming in ideas.”
No pun intended.
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