A partner at Snøhetta, where she leads its landscape architecture practice in the Americas, Delk talks about her journey to the profession and the spring travel studio she leads at Weitzman.
Michelle Delk didn’t always know what landscape architecture is but, even as a child in rural Iowa, she was fascinated by what land could be. A chance encounter with a notable earth artist, and a fruitful series of mentorships later, Delk is now a partner at New York’s Snøhetta, where she leads its landscape architecture practice in the Americas. This spring, she joins the faculty as the Laurie Olin Professor of Practice in Landscape Architecture. In an interview, which has been edited for clarity, she talks about how she came to her practice, her ideas about what the practice is and might be, and what her teaching might accomplish.
This story is part of Women of Weitzman, a news series celebrating the contributions of female faculty and recent alums to the built environment and the arts.
This will be your first semester at Penn. What are you teaching?
It's an upper-level studio where students have already had some of their core studios to begin their education. I think for most of the students, it’s the last studio they'll take before they graduate. We're basing the studio in Atlanta, Georgia, and we're looking at what is essentially a transect or a section across a portion of the city that passes through a number of different neighborhoods and site conditions with different historic and cultural significance. I'll be working with the students to learn as much as we can through different lenses of looking at what a landscape is, from a historic to physical to cultural context, to really learn about the area. Then, I'll work with the students to identify a more discrete site or location within that area to do a design exercise.
Why this particular site?
A couple reasons. One is that I think it's an incredible opportunity for students to be able to travel. I, as a student, gained so much from traveling to places that were unfamiliar, and really immersing in those places, and as part of my career as a landscape architect, I've had a wonderful opportunity to work in many, many different places. Every site, every condition, every place that we work as designers and as landscape architects, has latent or embodied histories and stories. Sometimes it's really very hard to see and truly understand what is held in a place. Atlanta is a complex, complicated city. So, there's mystery and intrigue. The physical landscape, speaking broadly, the geomorphology of the area really has shaped how the city has grown and changed. When you layer in the cultural and social histories, including the civil rights movements, there are many rich layers defining this city that is quintessentially American but also international. The land holds so many stories and it's very difficult to read. As landscape architects, one of the things we can try to do is find ways to make those histories legible.
550 Madison Avenue Garden, New York, New York, 2022 (Photo Barrett Doherty courtesy Snøhetta)
Is that what brought you into landscape architecture as a practice?
I grew up in a very rural part of Northern Iowa and I realize, looking back, I spent all my time as a young person outside. I also loved art, and I loved math. We're all complex people, right? But I spent a lot of time in the outdoors and making things in and with the landscape. I discovered landscape architecture much later. When I was in college, I had a passion for earthwork artists. Learning what they were doing led me to understand working the land as a way to communicate. That led me landscape architecture. But for me, it doesn't come necessarily from an ecological or horticultural point of view, although of course I value, appreciate and think about this aspect. I think my roots are more in, and with, the land itself.
How did that turn into a practice?
I initially went to Iowa State thinking I was going to be an engineer. I also had this kind of obsession: if you grow up in the landscape of rural Iowa, cities and infrastructure in the sense of highway systems and rail systems are pretty foreign. So, I think I had a strong curiosity about the social systems of cities. And so I tried engineering. I was trying hard not to be an artist because I thought I needed to be responsible! That would not be my point of view today, but it was for me at the time. In undergraduate school, I took an architecture studio, which also didn't resonate. I took a landscape architecture studio, and to be frank, that still didn't quite connect to what I was looking for. I actually decided to go back to art and arranged to transfer to the University of Iowa, which is more of a liberal arts school. But right before I left, an artist and landscape architect, Buster Simpson, came in to give a lecture. He had done these projects with nurse logs [a fallen tree that provides a growing environment for young plants as it decays], and here he was bringing them into the urban environment. This juxtaposition of a natural process and the crafting of an experience, place, or story—it helped me see that landscape architecture is, in a sense, anything you want it to be. I decided right at that moment that I would go to a master's program for landscape architecture.
“The land holds so many stories and it's very difficult to read. As landscape architects, one of the things we can try to do is find ways to make those histories legible.”
And what was it like to finally have a course of study for what you’d been interested in?
I went to University of Colorado at the Denver campus. There was one professor who was probably most impactful in terms of continuing to help me to see the potential and what architects can, and maybe should, be doing and thinking about. His name is Alan Berger (MLA'90), [he earned his graduate degree from Penn] and he teaches at MIT now. Working with him kept me focused. He was a challenging professor who was working to help push people to be critically minded. It wasn't easy, but it was incredibly important to my education. At the end of a year, I was working in the studio and he brought by a reviewer to meet me—Mark Johnson, the founder of a firm in Denver called Civitas. We chatted for a bit, and he told me to reach out for an internship. I did, and I was later hired on as a designer. Mark was critical in helping me to actually become a professional. I didn't have any idea what practice even was when I was a student. Maybe that's something I can help with a little bit in what I'll be doing at Penn. I was a principal when I left Civitas. I developed a breadth of understanding over my career. And Mark continues to be one of my closest friends, mentor, advisor, kind of everything. Then, in 2013, I joined Snøhetta.
Calgary Central Library, Calgary, Alberta, Canada, 2022 (Photo Marion Brenner courtesy Snøhetta)
Which is such an important firm—what have you learned working there?
Snøhetta, since the very beginning, had an ethos of thinking about landscape and buildings together. We’ve always had people from different design disciplines coming together. I’ve always known Snøhetta through that lens. In the time that I've been here, I’ve found that there's something quite unique about this as a starting point. Of course, there's many firms that have different disciplines and are working together—but it's really about that moment before, sometimes before you even know what a project is, where the thinking is coming from different perspectives from the different disciplines. Essentially, they asked me to help invest energy, time, and resources into growing the landscape architecture work and discipline within the New York studio and across the Americas. There were some people working in the studio as landscape architects, but there wasn't yet a strong sense of leadership and direction. The challenge that I was given was to come in to understand the culture and the ethos and then to build and grow from there. So that's what I've been doing over the last almost 12 years, nurturing what's already in place in terms of that way of working and thinking, but also to deepen it and to grow a team. When I joined, there were maybe four or five people working in that realm, and for the last several years, we've been hovering around 20. We've established a stronger practice, which means that we've expanded the kind of work and the way in which we work, as well as the position that we come into projects.
You said that helping students become professionals is something you’d like to do in your time at Penn. What does that mean to you?
If I look back to when I was a student, one of the things that I took away from my education was not only to be introduced to what landscape architecture is, but how to think strategically and nurture that side of our brain. As designers, there's obviously a creativity and a passion for making, but there’s also the strategic thinking of how you engage with the place and with people in a place and bring ideas along on the journey to achieve what you want to achieve. I think that it’s distinct to the design profession that it doesn't matter how good the idea is, it matters how you make it relevant to other people. For me, that's the part of practice that I think is a valuable connection to the academic world—the ability to read a place, develop a point of view that's informed and complex and can manage complexity, and then to have a voice at the table with a sense of confidence. There's a lot of room, space, and need for landscape architects to step into leadership positions. Landscapes are fundamentally systems in the physical space in which we live. But they're also systems that connect to social, cultural, and more invisible or less legible systems. I think that the people drawn to landscape architecture tend to be people that are very curious in many different ways. A lot of us find ourselves in situations where you maybe don't always know the answer or don't always feel that you are the expert. But being able to work your way through that with empathy and confidence? This is where landscape architects excel.
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