Catherine Seavitt (fourth from left) at a Spring 2024 studio review. “Our department is recognized as a place of collaborative conversation,” says Seavitt, who is also co-executive director of The Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism & Ecology.
When Catherine Seavitt joined the faculty of the Department of Landscape Architecture at the Weitzman School in 2023—becoming the seventh person to serve as its chair—she knew it was approaching an important milestone.
Although most people associate landscape architecture at Penn with Ian McHarg, the pioneering ecologist and public intellectual who led the program to international prominence in the mid-20th century, its origins go back decades earlier. Seavitt’s predecessor, Professor Emeritus Richard Weller, had discovered a series of lectures on landscape architecture at what was then known as the School of Fine Arts dating back to 1913 during the deanship of Warren Powers Laird. The first landscape architecture students arrived in 1924, with the appointment of Robert Wheelwright as the chair of the newly established Department of Landscape Architecture. Wheelwright was a founding member of the American Society of Landscape Architects, co-founder and editor of the journal Landscape Architecture, and a prominent landscape architect in New York and Philadelphia. While the program went dormant for a time between World War II and the arrival of McHarg in 1954, it resumed operations soon after.
So Seavitt set about planning a birthday party. On September 26 and 27, the Weitzman School will host Landscape Futures: Centennial of the Department of Landscape Architecture, a two-day symposium of lectures, panel discussions, and receptions. The aim is to celebrate the department’s unique ecological foundations, its evolving curriculum, and its ongoing global influence on landscape architectural practice and education, while addressing future disciplinary currents.
“Our department is recognized as a place of collaborative conversation,” Seavitt says. “Maybe that has to do with the way we landed within a strong program in the fine arts back in 1924. There have been novel, transdisciplinary conversations happening from the very beginning.”
Housed in the Department of Landscape Architecture, The McHarg Center was launched in 2019 Design with Nature Now, an exhibition and publication exploring the legacy of Ian McHarg through 25 ambitious ecological design interventions around the world.
Much of the early training of landscape architects was tied in with agricultural education at land-grant universities in the United States, says Weitzman Dean and Paley Professor Fritz Steiner. The American Society of Landscape Architects was founded in 1899, tightening the discipline’s association with architecture and more formal design theories. Wheelwright, the first chair of the program as an undergraduate course of study, once described the practice as the “one profession whose main objective has been to co-ordinate the works of man (sic) with preexistent nature.”
McHarg emphasized that connection and pointed the profession in a new direction after relaunching the department at Penn as a graduate program. The program operated as the Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning until the 1990s, when the Master of Regional Planning degree was sunset. McHarg’s massively influential book, Design with Nature (1969), describes and prescribes a design practice rooted in ecological systems. He developed a method of layering environmental data in maps that helped designers understand existing natural conditions and inform design decisions. On the 50th anniversary of the publication of Design with Nature, the Weitzman School of Design established The Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology with the mission of advancing ecological thinking and innovative design and planning research.
Successive leaders of the department made an imprint on the theory and practice of landscape architecture around the world. The Granite Garden, a 1985 book by Anne Whiston Spirn (MLA’74), who succeeded McHarg as chair of the department, “projected every trend that was going to happen in landscape education and practice over the next 25 years,” says Elizabeth Meyer, a professor of landscape architecture at the University of Virginia. Spirn, now the Cecil and Ida Green Distinguished Professor of Landscape Architecture and Planning at MIT, will give the opening keynote lecture at the centennial symposium on Friday, September 27.
“Anne had a huge influence on me, someone who was never her student,” Meyer says. “I think the impact of [Penn] on a lot of other programs was huge but indirect.”
Other department chairs—John Dixon Hunt, James Corner (MLA’86), and Richard Weller—wrote influential texts and designed spaces that have redefined the practice of landscape architecture. Corner, who began his career as a theorist and later founded Field Operations, the firm that designed the High Line in New York, among many other high-profile public projects, will give an evening keynote on opening night of the centennial, Thursday, September 26.
“I think we’ve always punched above our weight,” Steiner says. “If you look at the history of the department, it’s been leadership through the generation of ideas. All of the chairs, starting with McHarg, have been very much book people.”
“We’re at this turning point with climate and heat and thinking about this, and I think it really is opening up a lot of opportunities for building a better world,” Jeff Goodell told a recent interviewer about his latest book. He will speak at Landscape Futures on Friday, September 27. (Photo Matt Valentine courtesy Lyceum Agency)
The centennial symposium will include three panels moderated by Weitzman faculty, organized around the themes of The Household of Nature, The Astronaut, and The Naturalist. All three themes call back to McHargian ideas. McHarg hosted a television show about ecology called The House We Live In, for example, and used the figures of the astronaut and the naturalist as metaphors about humans’ relationship to the earth. But the symposium is also designed to celebrate the work of successive faculty who have challenged and repositioned those ideas, and reasserted the dynamism of landscapes and people’s work within them.
“Today, we should really question the very idea of layer separation. Is it possible to disentangle environmental and social layers that are intertwined and importantly, entangled in complex ways?” Seavitt says. “What do you lose when you separate things? What are you not seeing because you might be at too high an altitude? We need to get back into the weeds, literally, and reconsider our social and formal relations with both human and more-than-human beings.”
As landscape architecture education at Penn enters its second century, Seavitt says students are newly interested in different ways of understanding the landscape and what she calls “land practice”—learning through Indigenous and traditional ecological knowledge, plant knowledge, and mineral knowledge.
“We both desire and need to really think about other ways of being in the world, ways of caring for and nurturing both the planet and ourselves as a kind of collective,” she says. “That’s what I’m seeing students are powerfully and deeply interested in—social, environmental, and multispecies justice.”
Certainly, adapting to and mitigating the impacts of climate change remain central concerns of the landscape architecture profession and the Department of Landscape Architecture at Penn. Jeff Goodell, author of The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet, and a McHarg Center advisory board member, will give the closing night keynote talk at the centennial symposium on Friday, September 27. But the final word will be given to DJ Farrah Flosscett, who will spin records at Meyerson Hall on Friday night after the symposium concludes. For Steiner, who studied at Penn with McHarg in the 1970s, the centennial is a welcome chance to get together with colleagues, students, and friends.
“Our landscape architecture alumni base are good partiers,” Steiner says. “They show up for stuff like this.”
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