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My Top Five asks a Weitzman faculty member to curate a list of five cultural artifacts—in any medium, from any time period—to give insight into the latest thinking about visual culture and the built environment.
“Some days, all I do is read,” says Jessica Varner, an assistant professor of landscape architecture who studies the legacy of synthetic chemicals in the built environment. As a historian of material culture, Varner reads extensively. "I used to get in trouble for reading too much as a kid, but now it's part of my job."
"My favorite thing to do is read across narrative non-fiction, while digging into newly released, field-shifting academic books." Varner picks up books on gardens, minerals, trees, rocks, rivers, lakes, small towns, and more—topics that overlap with her own interests in environmental history, such as the EPA’s public history and synthetic chemicals in building materials. Her forthcoming book is Chemical Desires: When the Chemical Industry Met Modern Design (1870-1970).
Varner organized the Department of Landscape Architecture’s spring lecture series, which includes an April 2 talk by Caroline Tracey, whose book Salt Lakes is on Varner’s list.
1. Mill Town
In 2020, Kerri Arsenault's book Mill Town, about dioxin in Mexico, Maine, and a writing workshop I took with Kerri, forever changed the way I read and write. The best part is you can read Kerri's wit and energy in every word, on each page. It made me rethink what makes writing good and how to reconsider, and still cherish, the difficult, complex places that make us.
2. Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography
I read pieces of this book in progress. Since its release, it has been the most tattered book on my shelf. I keep pulling it out again and again.
Siobhan changes how we understand the history of photography. Brilliant, sweeping, and field-shattering, by reading Siobhan's crafting of history and theory, from bitumen to silver, Angus reorients the photograph through its material reliance on minerals mined from the earth, while also gesturing to art's ability to find a way through this extraction empire.
After reading Beronda L. Montgomery's recent book this spring, I saw every tree anew, on Locust Walk, in Clark Park, and around every corner in Philadelphia. Written from deep expertise and emotional connection, Montgomery's Arkansas roots and botanical wisdom craft how we understand the Black botanical legacies within the American landscape's saplings, shrubs, and arboreal lives.
As a gardener from a farming family, Kate Brown's new book spoke to me. Kate's ability to shift across subjects as a skilled environmental historian is enviable (Kate has written about everything from nuclear weapons to urban gardening as a resistant force). Tiny Gardens Everywhere offers small garden pockets across the globe and through time, Germany, Washington, D.C., and more, where urban agriculture tendered hope and resistance to political, social, and environmental crises. I recommend this to everyone who finds calm in putting their hands in the soil.
5. Salt Lakes: An Unnatural History
I just finished this book after receiving the advanced reader's copy last month. It's Tracey's first novel exploring how and why the queer ecologies and their attached salt lakes—endorheic basins fast disappearing, from Kazakhstan to Utah—are worth saving and an indicator of much larger environmental collapses to come. And we are lucky to bring Tracey to Penn for a talk on April 2nd, co-sponsored by the Weitzman Department of Landscape Architecture and the Department of English.
