Remembering Richard Weller (1963 – 2025)

Biography

Professor Emeritus of Landscape Architecture Richard Weller passed away on May 15, 2025 in Perth, Australia; he was 61. A vocal critic of what he saw as humanity’s hubris in redesigning Planet Earth, Weller drew on history, philosophy, and the arts to challenge the status quo in the built environment professions, and enlisted help from students and colleagues to develop a series of ambitious design proposals to protect biodiversity.

“Richard was as bold, witty, and beautiful as his prose and drawings,” said Dean and Paley Professor Fritz Steiner. “In grief, I find hope and joy that many others will discover Richard as I did: through what he wrote and drew and painted and designed.”

Weller chaired the Department Landscape Architecture from 2013 through 2022, and in 2019 he co-founded, with Dean and Paley Professor Fritz Steiner, the McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology. He was also the founding creative director of the interdisciplinary journal of landscape architecture LA+, one of the many projects he collaborated on with Tatum Hands. He previously held the Winthrop Professorship at the University of Western Australia, where continued to serve as an adjunct professor.

In four decades of practice, including as co-director of the design firm Room 4.1.3 and director of the Australian Urban Design Research Center, he worked as an academic and a consultant specializing in the formative stage of projects ranging from gardens to cities. His work was exhibited internationally, including at the Venice Architecture Biennale; MAXXI; and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. His design projects included the masterplan for the Perth foreshore; the masterplan and landscape design for the National Museum of Australia, Canberra; and the Docklands, Melbourne.

Among his many initiatives to bridge the academy and the profession, he helped write the Landscape Architecture Foundation’s “New Landscape Declaration” (2016) and conceptualized the Green New Deal Superstudio (2020-2021), a collaboration between the LAF, CELA, ASLA. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he curated a series of recorded lectures by Penn faculty members probing the roles of design in the 20th and 21st centuries, and subsequently edited, with Tatum L. Hands, The Landscape Project, the first published collection of essays by faculty members in the Department of Landscape Architecture. “Design is a Promethean gift and responsibility” he writes in the book’s introduction. “If only by degree it distinguishes humans from other living things who actively shape their world.”

Weller was the author or editor of nine books and author of well over 150 academic papers, book chapters and articles on the theory and practice of landscape architecture and urban design. He co-edited Transects (2014; with alum Megan Talarowski), a history of the Department of Landscape Architecture at Penn, and Design with Nature Now (with Fritz Steiner, Karen M’Closkey, and Billy Fleming), a global survey of advanced ecological design projects and essays published in 2019 by the McHarg Center in association with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. Boomtown 2050: Scenarios for a Rapidly Growing City (University of Western Australia Publishing, 2005), is Weller’s critical examination of the development of the capital city of Perth, while Beautiful China: Reflections on Landscape Architecture in Contemporary China (ORO Editions, 2021; with Tatum Hands) brings together leading Chinese designers and educators on the government’s national policy to protect and promote cultural and aesthetic values in the midst of rapid economic growth and urbanization. Made in Australia: The Future of Australian Cities (Univeristy of Western Australia Publishing, 2013; with Julian Bolleter) undertakes scenario planning at a nationwide scale for Australia’s projected population of 62 million by the year 2100.

In recent years, his research focused on global flashpoints between biodiversity and urban growth, as documented in the web-based platforms The World Park Project, The Hotspot Cities Project and the Atlas for the End of the World and exhibited at the 2021 Venice Biennale. His work was the subject of two monographs, Room 4.1.3: Innovations in Landscape Architecture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005) and  An Art of Instrumentality: The Landscape Architecture of Richard Weller (ORO Editions, 2023), and his latest book was To the Ends of the Earth: A Grand Tour for the 21st Century (Birkhauser, 2024; with images by alum Oliver Atwood). The latter grew out of a history and theory course he taught for decades. Weller’s work was the subject of 2023 retrospective exhibition at the Melbourne School of Design entitled The Landscape Architecture of Richard Weller, and his guided tour can be found on YouTube.

Tributes

The Weitzman School is planning an in-person celebration of Richard Weller's life and work on September 12, 2025. (Students, faculty, and active alums will receive details via email.) To contribute photographs, email Submitt.l69v7gcg8ejc2c1o@u.box.com. To add your voice to the collection below, contact news@design.upenn.edu.

Lucinda Sanders
Adjunct Professor of Landscape Architecture; CEO, OLIN

This moment is seared in my memory: the formidable figure of Richard Weller delivering his lucid and prescient inaugural lecture in the fall of 2013. Who was this man who could clearly articulate the landscape from extra-small (the plaza) to extra-large (the globe)— and all of the dimensions in between? How was it possible for landscape architects to think and act at so many scales? Well, he was about to show us, and by us, I mean students, faculty, alumni, the profession, and people who were not even trained in our field and who may not have contemplated the possibilities along the spectrum. He was on a mission to explore the crevices and potential by stretching McHargian theory and practice well beyond the boundaries of the influential founder. He was beckoning us forward by ushering those theories into the urgent matters of the 21st century.

In true Richard fashion, the first year he arrived, he wasted no time in in seeking to unpack and understand the clarity of the pedagogical mission of the department. He assembled the faculty on a day he coined the SUPEREVIEW, with an emphasis on the word SUPER (a word he would frequently repeat), so he could understand what everyone was teaching. He concluded, “It’s good, but the narrative of the department is too confusing—and some of the studios are just too difficult for a first semester student.” Richard needed a way to talk about the studio sequence that made sense and a method to organize the required lectures, workshops, and seminars so they complemented and supported each studio. Out of this, you guessed it, he organized the sequence into S, M, L, and XL with the final year offering studio and seminar electives that spanned the same scales of thought and offered a place for each student to dig more deeply into that which they loved. As someone who appreciates clarity, I was mesmerized by the inevitability and realization of the idea. 

The publications he produced along the way were staggering, but above all they were a natural outgrowth of Richard’s dedication to McHarg: Transects, a history of the department; Design with Nature Now, an examination of where the profession had taken McHargian ideas 50 years later; The Hotspot Cities Project, a wakeup call to attend to places under the most severe threat; and The World Park Project, among many others, a proclamation of where we could go. While these ideas are importantly memorialized in the written word, together, Richard and Fritz, left a living, breathing legacy to McHarg by founding the Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology. We can think of the Center  as an invitation—and even and insistence—that everyone who passes through the Department of Landscape Architecture of the Weitzman School of Design, be they faculty, student, fellow, advisory board member, or guest, has the obligation to continue pushing forward through the world of inquiry into the possibility of a better world for all the living inhabitants of the earth. 

Yet, I will not forget the question Richard posed to me: “Why are landscape architects such optimists?” He was right. We are. I think I said something about it being a part of our uniqueness and why we are here on this earth. Throughout his career, Richard critically examined the paradox of humanity—the intractable messes we have made and the possibilities of a sustainable future. Despite this tension, Richard, too, embodied the optimism for a better future. All who knew him will miss the depth of his friendship, leadership, and intellect.
 

James Corner (MLA'86)
Professor Emeritus of Landscape Architecture; Founding Partner & CEO, Field Operations

Just a few days before his passing, Richard shared with me nearly 75 paintings from his “Animals: The Human Condition” series, a collection that he had painted over the past few months, through all his pain and suffering. Animals inspired his thinking about the non- human otherness of nature and evolution, and his fond affection for all forms of animate life.
 
Richard kindly offered to paint for me one or two extra if I could let him know what I liked. In awe and admiration, I immediately told him I liked “Dingo” and “Giraffe,” to which he responded that it was “one day at a time,” and that he may not be able to get to them. A couple of days later, he told me that he had asked the doctor to load him up with steroids, and he had heroically managed to get these two paintings done for me. Classic Richard—stoic, tenacious and determined. 

Just a few days later, he passed away.
 
This is just one story of one of the most remarkable human beings I have ever known. As very good friends and professional colleagues, we spent many hours debating both life and the field of landscape. Richard was intellectually brilliant, artistically gifted, socially generous and a wonderful soul.
 
I miss him deeply and will cherish his gifts of “Dingo” and “Giraffe” forever. His passing is too soon and devastatingly unfair.
 
My heart and love now go out to Tatum, Richard’s true love, sage, muse and most inspiring spirit-animal.
 
RIP my friend.

Barbara Deutsch
CEO, Landscape Architecture Foundation

I have had the honor and privilege of working with Richard on the Board of Directors of the Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF) from 2014 to 2018 and as an active Board Emeritus thereafter. I will miss him terribly. He was an incredible mind, advocate, and exceptionally accomplished leader in landscape architecture. Always upbeat, a visionary, passionate and influential leader who knew when we needed an advocate and when we needed a contrarian, and a generous soul with his energy and service, Richard created an extraordinary legacy with LAF that will live on for decades to come.

Richard's vision and leadership helped the organization turn ideas into action and bring to fruition two bold initiatives that were catalytic for LAF and the landscape architecture discipline:

• LAF’s 2016 Summit on Landscape Architecture and the Future to mark LAF’s 50 year anniversary and, and the resulting New Landscape Declaration, a new agenda for the discipline, which he so poetically authored and will continue to inspire and activate landscape architects and the discipline for generations to come
• A national Green New Deal Superstudio, which he conceptualized as a Board Emeritus, to translate the core goals of the Green New Deal—decarbonization, justice, and jobs—into design and planning projects. The Superstudio’s success and the ideas it inspired informed the most important conversations emerging in design at the time.

I will be forever grateful for Richard's service and dedication to LAF, for his humor and presence, and for bringing the hopes and aspirations of landscape architects and the discipline together in clear and impactful ways to help make our vital contribution and the 21st century our time.

Laurie Olin
Practice Professor Emeritus in Landscape Architecture; Founding Partner, OLIN

We missed Richard even before he was finally gone.

He was a challenging remarkable person, inspiring teacher, and force for good, who has been cut down in his prime. It doesn’t seem right.

We first heard of him twenty-some years ago when a surprising project at the National Museum of Australia at Canberra appeared in the design press: The Garden of Australian Dreams (or GOAD). It was spunky, brash, challenged preconceptions about what things—especially a courtyard garden in an important national institution should be and look like.  It raised issues about troubling social history and the environment with a palette of startling bright colors and jazzy, jostling shapes, a composition of hard shiny surfaces, dramatic forms, water, and polychrome pavements. There were no plants. It was meant to challenge expectations and cause reflection about many things social, cultural, historical, and natural. It was clearly art. It was also a landscape of some kind. It was fresh. Penn Press published a striking book featuring it and the work and thought of a challenging theoretical and research-based practice of a young Australian landscape architect and teacher named Richard Weller and a partner Vladimir Sitta called Room 4.1.3.

And so, he entered our lives—a provocateur and intellect who cared passionately about the world and had chosen landscape architecture and regional planning as an avenue and medium for his energy and desire to do something positive about cities and the problems humans had wrought upon the world.

Like all true artists and designers, he wanted to change things, and to do so he believed we needed to change ourselves, our habits of mind, our methods, and values. He was right of course. Like many artists, writers, philosophers, designers, and medicine men through history, as a young person he dropped out of society and cities for a time, to collect himself, to be alone out in the natural world. He told me he lived and slept rough on a beach in the open and temporary shacks he threw together facing the omnipresence of the ocean, dangerous and beautiful yet teeming with life, savoring the magnificence of the world and planet, swimming and surfing for a period of time longer than society generally understands or approves.  Like Thoreau and others on spiritual quests, he returned to society and civilization—with purpose and ambition. 

He read voraciously, became a landscape architect, went off to see the world, lived and worked professionally in Europe, absorbing an enormous amount, returning to Australia to work and teach. He had a keen eye and a fine hand. He attacked problems as intensly as I imagine he must have attacked and rode killer waves. Like others who had begun life and their journey in what many in dominant centers of Europe and America unknowingly consider a marginal realm, a distant colony, he was a penetrating student of the mother ship and its ways, its preconceptions, achievements, prejudices, and failings. Richard was a citizen of the world from a great continent with a spectacular natural landscape and panoply of creatures and life—unique plants, animals, indigenous people, powerful geology and climate—who was possessed by a feeling for and an encyclopedic interest in the processes of life on the planet.

It isn’t surprising that he found his way to Penn where Ian McHarg had taught, written Design with Nature, and challenged the state of landscape design, civil engineering, and urban planning, while pioneering ecological planning and design methods now familiar and in use around the globe. Academic disciplines and departments depend and thrive upon change, renewal, and intellectual challenge. The Landscape Department at Penn has had a worthy succession of chairs in the past five decades. Richard fit the mold, and it wasn’t a surprise that on arriving he made it clear he was intent upon reinvigorating Ian’s larger view about regional design and planning, especially ecological planning at the scale of the problems of today, namely transregional, transpolar, transcontinental, and global within our department and school.

Richard was creative and productive. He and his equally brilliant wife and companion Tatum Hands invented, launched, edited, and published a new journal from the Department, LA+, a provocative, intellectually probing, curious, and distinctively handsome publication that challenged what the issues and topics might be for a field with the interests and ambitions of landscape architecture and planning. It was the opposite of a trade journal with projects of practitioners but instead a journal, each issue of which, is a think piece about some issue regarding life, society, and physical design responses—existing, past, and possibly future. Again: fresh, provocative, thought inducing, creative.

The Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning during Weller’s tenure as chairman was stuffed with action, events, publications, conferences, exhibitions and lively student and faculty debate. He was central in working with the Dean, Fritz Steiner, to help invent and codirect the Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology, and production of the important conference, exhibitions, and publication, Design with Nature Now. Richard energetically advocated a global ecological park to preserve, protect, and link global hot spots and reservoirs of biological diversity, working through the center and his many contacts around the globe.

I’ve neglected to say he had a great sense of humor and frequently masked his own amusement and delight with sardonic wit.

Richard is gone, but his thoughts and charge to us, his students and colleagues remain.

Rob Levinthal (MLA'20)
PhD in City and Regional Planning Candidate

Learning the news on Friday of Richard’s passing was heartbreaking. This is not just in thinking about the family and friends he left behind, but also for the students and life-long learners who will never hear his masterful sermons in person, the world that might not implement his restorative plans, and anyone who might have crossed his path. In 2020, after finishing my Master of Landscape Architecture, I had a few options to pursue a PhD, but the choice was easy when considering that I could spend a few more years learning and observing the habits of the premier voice in the discipline. Though our time together was cut short by his multi-year battle with cancer, he always reached out and never skipped a beat when returning home to Australia. In true Richard fashion, he never complained and worked up until his last days, painting a collection of works on the human condition that explores our failure to live as stewards with the animals we share this planet with. And to my ultimate embarrassment, he continued to edit my dissertation and write me job references. I would not have asked him to write and review these things had I known his true state, but Richard also wrote terse e-mails that I never fully learned to decipher. He also generously and selflessly volunteered his time to anyone who asked, and downplayed his accolades and challenges, even in facing death. It is because of Richard’s steadfast state and strong sense of being that I never once considered that he might lose this battle with cancer until I heard the news. I never thought the world could prematurely lose such a presence, a force, and the voice needed to take on the most perplexing problems we face in climate change and biodiversity loss. I take some solace in the fact that Richard left behind an extraordinary collection of writings and lengthy recordings to learn from. For example, during COVID, I had the great privilege of being the teaching assistant for his Culture of Nature course, which, having moved remote, was unbound by time. As such, a 1.5-hour course became 8- and 9-hour lectures. They never rambled, they were always interesting, and they showed such exquisite mastery of any and all materials that he linked to landscape.

A few years ago, while working on an art exhibit up until the late hours with him in Meyerson Hall, I had the unique opportunity to hear his stories and ask him more personal questions, which he seldom shared with students. It was a full and extraordinary life. As his decade-long standing as chair of the landscape department was ending, I sought advice and asked if he had any regrets. He said no, he had given it his all. He said that he seldom spent personal time outside Meyerson during his appointment and that he lived as best as he could in accordance with his values. I also asked him, with all his interesting experiences and numerous contributions to the field, whether he would consider writing an autobiography to capture it. He looked at me in disgust and said it's too self-aggrandizing. I wish he had. And I wish he had given me the chance to tell him how much I loved him. Richard was a great mentor, professor, chair, and friend. He will be dearly missed.

Ken Lum
Marilyn Jordan Taylor Presidential Professor of Fine Arts

Richard Weller's passing deeply saddens me. Our tenures as respective Landscape Architecture and Fine Arts Chairs overlapped for many years. During that time, Richard contacted Fine Arts numerous times to cooperate in Landscape Architecture charettes and seminar sessions. Richard also participated as a speaker for several Fine Arts seminars. I felt he was more than a colleague but a kindred spirit. He loved to think outside strictures while respecting all necessary basic knowledge. He never separated the idea of design from lived experience. He had the energy and drive to make the world a better, more sustainable, and hopeful place. I am grateful to have known him. He deepened my life as I know he did for many others.

Catherine Seavitt
Meyerson Professor and Chair of Landscape Architecture

In the early months of 2023, I shared many late-night-New-York-early-morning-Australia phone calls with Richard. From Perth, with a dawn chorus of birds audible behind him, he shared how wonderfully enriching he had found his time as department chair at Penn: the fantastic students, the talented faculty, the beautiful scale of Philadelphia, and the deep impact of the Penn platform. His love for this planet and all its creatures, as well as his wry warnings that we humans were really messing things up, is reflected in all his work. Richard captured the world’s diversity while calling out our poor stewardship of this Spaceship Earth, especially with his last publications and his poignantly beautiful animal paintings. Many years ago, we bonded in conversation over Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical letter, Laudato Si’. I think it’s one of the best pieces of environmental writing out there, he told me. Having recently reviewed Laudato Si’ for The Avery Review, I completely agreed. I bet Richard liked the Pope’s poetic chapter subheadings as much as I do: “Justice Between the Generations.” “Beyond the Sun.” My favorite: “Ecological Conversion.” And I’m sure the letter’s emphasis on the importance of biodiversity resonated with him: every species possesses an “intrinsic value,” beyond any discussion of profit—and each extinction is a loss forever. “Thousands of species will no longer convey their message to us. We have no right,” writes Francis.

I remain grateful for Richard’s trust, his ongoing wise counsel, and his departmental groundwork. Take the job, he said. You won’t regret it. Richard was indeed “tilling and keeping the garden of the world.” Our collective hearts go out to Tatum. Rest in power, Richard.

John Landis
Professor Emeritus of City and Regional Planning

When Richard Weller was named chairperson of Penn’s Department of Landscape Architecture in 2012, my first thought was, “What will an Aussie from Perth know about running an LA department in Philadelphia?” Quite a lot as it turns out. Richard embodied the best of his predecessors: Ian McHarg’s environmental stewardship, John Dixon Hunt’s careful scholarship, and James Corner’s originality and ability to push landscape architecture in new directions. More than that, Richard was entirely his own person. He was energetic (founding the journal LA+ is his inaugural year as chair, and later on, with Dean Fritz Steiner, the McHarg Center), charismatic (drawing the best students to Landscape Architecture with his enthusiasm and by the force of personality), kind (always supportive of his Penn colleagues and students), original (who else would have thought of a system of global biodiversity parks?) dedicated to his craft (Richard was a first-rate landscape designer), and funny (in that Aussie way that takes Americans a while to appreciate). Schoolwide faculty meetings were never boring when Richard was around. Along with his wife and collaborator, Tatum Hands, Richard was an institution builder, and he privileged all of us who knew him with his grace and warmth.

Laura Solano
Partner, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Inc.

I didn’t know Richard Weller as well as others who have shared their tributes here, but even in the year we overlapped as Board Members for the Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF), it didn’t take long to experience his brilliance, intensity, and humor. Richard arrived at LAF at a seminal moment; the LAF was nearing its 50th anniversary and their ambition was to write a New Declaration of Landscape, which would revisit, refine, and refresh for the 21st Century, LAF’s original 1966 Declaration of Concern, which gave light to the growing troubles caused by “over misuse of the environment and development which has lost all contact with the basic processes of nature” as well as a call to landscape architects to take heed of this warning. It was penned by Campbell Miller, Grady Clay, Ian L. McHarg, Charles R. Hammond, George E. Patton, and John O. Simonds, all luminaries of the professions.
 
A committee of earnest and energized Board members was organized to write the New Declaration, but as these things go, it got messy. Enter Richard, who took on writing the first full draft solo by pulling threads from every source and making it into whole cloth. At the time, I had been reading about the writing of the Declaration of Independence (and others), but it struck me that Richard was our Thomas Jefferson—who had also been picked by his colleagues to write THE Declaration because he was admired for his intelligence and his “happy talent for composition”. John Adams also claimed (and Jefferson disputed) that he had the fewest enemies in Congress; the same could be said of Richard and the profession. Richard would never take the full credit he deserved for his contribution, which was just another reason he was deeply admired.

Colin Curley (MLA'16, MArch'16)
Art Director, LA+; Senior Associate, Field Operations

It is difficult to overstate the impact that Richard had on me as a student, a designer, and as a person. He encouraged me, challenged me, enthusiastically supported my ideas and endeavors (not without pushing back and making them stronger, of course), was an unwavering mentor, and went to bat for me when I needed someone in my corner. I know that this description is not unique, but I share it because the fact that countless others would describe him the same way is a testament to the incredible educator and person that he was.

Richard brought me into LA+ with Tatum over 10 years ago, first as a researcher and production manager, and eventually entrusting me with the opportunity to guest-edit an entire issue of my own toward the end of his tenure. Never in my life before or since have I been complimented on my ability to "find weird shit," nor have I been involved in a project for which that was identified as a strength. But that was what Richard did: identify your strengths, help you find your voice, and give you the courage to speak it. Working on LA+ with Richard and Tatum was an exercise in looking at the world differently, approaching complex issues from different perspectives, challenging norms, and being provocative while maintaining intellectual rigor. I am a better designer and world citizen for it. Richard was the most entertaining and approachable human encyclopedia that you could ever meet, and was also an exquisite chef who somehow never had a cell phone, yet managed to make you feel like you were never further than a phone call away.
 
Loss and grief are complicated, and while I absolutely feel loss and sadness as many of us do, I feel a profound sense of gratitude that I had the privilege of knowing, learning from, and collaborating with Richard as a professor and as a friend. 
 
Rest easy, Richard. The world is a better place because you were in it.

Alan Berger (MLA ’90)
Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Richard Weller was a rare mind—restless, expansive, and deeply attuned to the world in all its complexity. As a mentor, collaborator, and friend, he brought extraordinary clarity and curiosity to everything he touched. Our conversations could range effortlessly across philosophy, art, natural systems, cities, suburbs, and planetary concerns. With Richard, ideas flowed freely—bold, unfiltered, often surprising, always illuminating. I still remember the day we first met at Penn: I thought who was this guy—a landscape architect or a rock star? He was both.

He had an incredible instinct for people and potential. He generously sent brilliant researchers from Penn to MIT, not just as a professional courtesy but as part of his broader mission: to connect, challenge, and elevate. I know firsthand that his voice lives on through his students who are with me now.

When I learned of his passing I was in a dissertation review with his former student now doing a PhD with me. We both looked at each other with shock and sadness, a deep mutual loss for the person who first introduced us. I had just spoken with him a couple months ago and he was happy to be home. Now, somewhere in the universe, Richard is already at work on a new mapping project, charting ideas the rest of us haven’t yet imagined. I only wish we had more earthly time together.

His absence is profound, but so is his imprint. He made us think bigger, see further, and care more deeply. I’m grateful to have known him.

Rest in peace, Richard.

Boqian Xu (MLA'16, PhD'23)
Assistant Professor, Texas A&M University

In another parallel universe without knowing Richard, I wouldn’t know where I am or what I am doing. He has given me directions many times when I’ve been at a crossroads. In 2014, Richard brought me into the MLA program and the landscape architecture family of Penn. Over the first several years, I learned his thoughts through his theory class The Culture of Nature, through his Jing-Jin-Ji megaregion studio, and through his lectures on Anthropocene and Planetary Design. To be honest, as a design student, I often felt confused about his interests. I didn’t understand why he was fascinated by distant Chinese concepts such as Ecological Civilization. I didn’t understand why his studio comments would sometimes roam or seem off-topic. I didn’t understand how landscape architects could design the planet.

After a few years of practice, I returned to Penn for my PhD, studying new towns and ecocities in China—a topic inspired by the Jing-Jin-Ji megaregion studio. Richard was on my dissertation committee, but we didn’t meet very often in the first couple of years due to the pandemic. Before my proposal defense, I presented him a draft chapter measuring the ecosystem services of China’s new town projects, which suggested that the new towns had improved local ecosystems. Richard then commented that I couldn’t judge these projects simply by whether they were greener or not. He pointed out that cities’ metabolisms are typically high and threaten the global ecosystem, even if cities themselves look eco-friendly. Later, he suggested the indicator of Ecological Footprint, which also accounts for metabolisms. Since then, I have dived into Ecological Footprint research, working on the topic for years—and I will continue working on it for many more. It seems that I’m following his path as a planet steward.

Now I know why I didn’t understand Richard back then: He sees a bigger world.

Barbara Wilks (MLA'93)
Founding Partner, W Architecture and Landscape Architecture

Richard had a magical effect on most people—he brought out your best and helped you see more clearly. He listened, and responded with boldness and truth. He could bring together the unexpected with precision and shocking clarity. From The World Park Project to his small collage/paintings of animals, his wide range of projects were rooted in respect for the earth and all of its inhabitants.

It’s not surprising when he came to Penn, his first project, the book Transects, laid out the school’s history and clarified its legacy—so obvious in retrospect but yet not done before. I had the honor of working with Richard on his next project, the McHarg Center, by funding the executive director position (with my sister Nanci). With the passion of McHarg, Richard carried the legacy of our school into the future.

Like Ian, Richard was inspiring, his passion contagious. It seems unreal that someone so vital is no longer with us. In keeping with his legacy of action, I hope I can honor his passing by working with our community and others to continue to push the legacy forward—protecting and respecting the diversity of all life and finding ways large and small to make the world safer and more habitable for all of us. 

Thank you, Richard, for your time with us—your generous spirit will guide us into the future

Winka Dubbeldam
Professor of Architecture; Founding Partner, Archi-Tectonics

How incredibly sad that Richard, a talented designer, painter, writer, and great colleague, had to leave this world so early. We started both as Chair at Penn in 2013, and both ran our departments for 10 years. We collaborated back and forth, joined award committees together, and planned certificates and dual degree programs. Always critically optimistic, wildly enthusiastic and most of all, very human, he was a great colleague and fantastic co-conspirator. We will miss you Richard. Dear Tatum, my warmest condolences. You are his rock.

Lesia Mokrycke (MFA'21, MLA'21)
Founder, Tropos

Richard was a formidable presence at Penn, and I was very sorry to hear about his recent passing. His belief in my ability to be both an artist and a landscape architect laid the first bridge toward the work I aspired to do professionally. He recognized the potential for me to develop a unique practice early on in my time at Penn, and throughout my graduate studies—both when it was challenging and enriching—he never wavered in his belief that I could bring something new to the discipline.

I will always be thankful for this early push in the right direction, and for the commitment he showed toward the arts, creativity, and innovation within the field—tirelessly pushing the bounds of what landscape architecture is, and asking questions about what it could be. Thank you, Richard, for always pushing us forward, for being both an inspiration and presenting an opportunity for challenge, and for the enduring reminder to reach higher and to always give our best.

May the wind be at your back. Rest in Peace.

Matthew Rimmer
Professor, QUT Faculty of Business and Law

20 years ago, I wrote about the moral rights controversy over the Garden of Australian Dreams—the landscape garden at the National Museum of Australia designed by Richard Weller, and slated for demolition by the Howard Government. I had a few dealings at the time with the landscape architect —who ultimately prevailed in the dispute. I read today of the recent passing of Richard Weller. Amongst his many other achievements, he was a champion of landscape architects being properly recognised as copyright creators and owners, with full economic and moral rights. His legal fight to protect the integrity of landscape architecture will no doubt be an important legacy for future members of the profession and the artistic field.

Asad Delsouzkhaki

I am Asad Delsouzkhaki, an Iranian applicant for the UPenn MLA program who had the honor of being interviewed by Professor Weller after the application cycle for 2020. For me, the spirit and personality of UPenn were deeply reflected in his character and presence. I still remember how seeing him on screen—speaking with such kindness, humility, and warmth—made me even more eager to join the program. During the interview, I recall him saying, “Iran’s plateau has a fascinating and beautiful landscape. I noticed it while flying over once or twice—I’m from Australia.” I instantly replied, “Yes, it is a beautiful country, but don’t come here—they take hostages.” He laughed heartily at the joke—an unforgettable moment for me. Unfortunately, I was unable to secure a visa and thus missed the chance to benefit from his guidance and insight. I extend my heartfelt condolences to his family, friends, and all who were close to him.

Lucía Artavia (MCP'16)

Learning about all the memories, contributions and lessons that have been shared here by others, as well as by looking back on my own experiences with him, just shows how we are all filled with a grand sense of gratitude for Richard. His energy and genius towards Penn, his students, and designing with nature go beyond what words could describe. I truly admire his life journey of catapulting himself, constantly, after deep exploration and work, into new levels and scales of boldness, solutions and creativeness. He has left behind an enormous legacy that will inspire the work of many of his students and mentees. In my case, he has guided, contributed and inspired my career and life vision permanently. His warmth, sense of humor, energy and overarching generosity in everything he did will remain very close to my heart throughout the years.  My condolences to his family and close friends.

James Andrew Billingsley (MArch'20, MLA'20)

My relationship with landscape architecture is coextensive with my relationship with Richard Weller. He was the first landscape architect I ever met, in his office during the 2016 Penn open house, where I'd come to try and present myself as a strong candidate deserving of more financial aid. To this end I had prepared some sort of clever question about Ian McHarg; Richard, of course, clocked my intentions immediately, but he had the grace to not hold it against me. Instead, he told me that at Penn every student was responsible for personally exhuming McHarg’s bones and disposing of them according to their own vision for landscape architecture. This remark introduced me to two components of Richard's voice that would become familiar over the next nine years: humor and existentialism, both rare in a discipline that tends to lack either. Connect the two with a dashed line and place a vertical stroke down the middle, perhaps marked “life,” or “psychology,” or “landscape,” and you have the beginnings of one of his familiar dialectical diagrams—one charged with the pathos that seemed more present in his work the longer I knew him.

The metaphor’s meaning—that students should start from a place of complete, personal deconstruction of their newly-chosen discipline—was not an affect, but a real expectation, authentically held. How else to explain asking every new landscape architect to try to understand Descartes and Haraway before drawing so much as a single contour line? It was daunting; but he was always ready to talk it through, as patiently as necessary. At the time I believed that “The Culture of Nature” was equipping me with the mental frameworks necessary for engaging with the bewildering complexity of landscape architecture’s ever-expanding field. Now I suspect something different: that in his mind, the compulsive questioning is the point, and that the landscape architect is the unlucky person whose job is to struggle at locating humanity in the universe along an infinite variety of ethical, epistemological, political, and ontological dimensions (again, those familiar conceptual axes); and that all our other responsibilities are downstream. Many of us who passed through Richard's department are still searching for such a landscape architecture.

As a student, my primary experience of Richard's pedagogy was of an enormous generosity, both of time and serious attention—qualities whose rarity in academic departments I did not realize until much later. His door was open; his correspondence was fast, kind, and free; there was always a chance that he'd wander into a jury and turn a bad review (or a good one) on its head by pulling on an idea (another of his lessons: while landscape architects have a weakness for gimmicks, the answer is not to retreat from ideas but instead to engage them with rigor). The result was an environment in which the stakes were high: not just in the familiar competition for career prospects, but in the knowledge that any idea, if nurtured and thoughtfully pursued, could carry a project; generate a lifelong practice; or reframe an entire discipline. The possibilities of landscape seemed then to be infinite; they seem smaller now.

Later in that first meeting Richard told me that even though my portfolio hadn't been exceedingly strong, sometimes he liked to roll the dice anyway. I can't know for sure what he ended up thinking about the gamble, but it was the luckiest throw of my life.

Susannah C. Drake
Principal, SASAKI

Almost a week has passed since I learned of the passing of Richard Weller. Richard’s ongoing contributions to the profession of landscape architecture will be deeply missed. Richard leaves behind a tremendous legacy of books, essays, works, and art that enrich current discourse. As chair of landscape architecture at Penn, Richard provided strong and clear leadership, helping the program develop clear pedagogy that produced many current thought and practice leaders. The McHarg Center was founded under Richard’s leadership, creating an important new platform for collaboration and expression among students, professors, allied professionals, practitioners, and the public.

I was honored to work with Richard on Design with Nature Now, contributing to the section on Rising Tides.  Through this publication, teaching, and establishment of the McHarg Center at the University of Pennsylvania Richard both carried on McHarg’s Legacy and contributed his own compelling voice reflecting both progress and lack thereof in relation to human relationship to the earth. He shares McHarg’s influence but with his own distinct voice.

Richard was the chair at Penn as my firm Dlandstudio evolved. We shared a passion for inculcating landscape architecture into the planning and design of infrastructure and policy structures that shape the modern landscape.  Serving together on the Landscape Architecture Foundation board, I always appreciated Richard’s unexpected questions, provoking important discourse that stretched conversations beyond shallow interrogation of expected answers. His art was in many ways an extension of this provocation as well, making the viewer question human exceptionalism and face the 6th extinction. I am grateful that he was so prolific in his lifetime, yet sad that he will no longer be our trusted colleague, mentor, and leader. 

We miss you, Richard.

Rebecca Popowsky (MArch'10, MLA'10)
Wilks Family Direcctor, McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology

I had the opportunity to talk to Richard earlier this month. We spoke for more than an hour about the McHarg Center, which he had helped shape over the last several years as Founding Co-Director. He asked how things were going since I joined the Center in January and offered to be a sounding board. In the wide-ranging conversation, Richard was energetic, generous and brilliant—that is, Richard was thoroughly himself. He hadn’t wanted to “bore” me with talk of his health, but I hung up feeling relieved that he sounded so well.

I also felt the kind of relief that you always feel after sitting for a time with a great teacher. The sense that your ideas have been heard, carefully considered, and improved. Even though I never took a class with Richard— I graduated from Penn before Richard joined the faculty—I always walked away from our conversations feeling inspired and confident. Richard had that magical ability shared by all great teachers. He listened. Then he responded. And in his response, you would hear your own voice, reflected, but with more clarity and greater potential. In the two years that I co-taught studios with Richard, I saw all of our students walk away from desk crits and reviews feeling similarly confident and inspired. And more than anything, feeling that with Richard as a sounding board, they were getting closer to finding their own creative voices. 

Richard hired me to teach in Penn’s Summer Institute in 2014. Over the following ten years, his support never wavered. He has had more of an influence on me as a teacher and as a thinker than anyone, and I will be forever grateful for that. I am also grateful that Richard spent much of his last few years writing, speaking and painting, so that many of the ideas that he’d bounced around in desk crits and studio reviews, were captured and shared. His book An Art of Instrumentality, which beautifully gathers forty years of professional and theoretical work, reflects his expansive thinking, across scales of space and time, and from the most profound to the most ordinary—always both deadly serious and really funny:

“I love the very word landscape: its gravitas, its ubiquity, and also its quotidian banality. I mean, on the one hand, landscape carries the weight of the world, indeed it is the weight of the world, and on the other, it’s just something you stand on while waiting for the bus.”

Richard passed away one week after we spoke. I was devastated by the news. But I felt relieved to know that he was so thoroughly himself, until the end.  

With love to Tatum and to Richard’s family and friends.

Grant Revell
And Studios, North Fremantle, Australia

Dear Richard:

Grant here. I wonder how you are doing? You ought to know we miss you ever so much. Just the thought of you going is utterly tragic. Impossible. 

Again, I wanted to thank you for your collegial friendship and your massive contributions to the worlds’ landscape architecture. You made a huge difference to my life. And to our students. And to many others. I also want to pay tribute to the amazing women in your celebrated life - Robyn, Tatum and Fran. I hope they are coping. They kept you real, acute, productive, joyful and fun loving.

Your life was full of greatness.

I thank you for your encouragement to be outspoken, to swing with brittle branches, to be mindful of forbidden fruits, and to keep asking the difficult questions.

Miss you dearly Richard.

My critical friend.

Rebecca Sibinga (MLA’21, MArch’21)

I learned of Richard’s passing only on the Monday after the fact. Immediately (with much superstition and very little regard for those affected as I had not been) it seemed that the terrible storm on that past Friday, which had rocked the greater part of the DC metro area with all the fury to be expected from a tornado, destroying houses and lives — was as fitting an omen of so monumental a loss as any could be: a storm for a man who perpetually struck me as approximately two parts hurricane stuffed into a sharp suit and a third again a quality that I can only sum up as a deep kindness, which informed every conversation we ever had.  

I’ve had to ask myself, coming to grips with it: how do you appropriately mourn the passing of a force of nature? Which is perhaps as close to a Richardism as I will ever manage; I suspect I shall spend a long time working out the answers. 

Richard Weller was an amazing teacher, a brilliant speaker and writer, a designer and artist with a deft striking style, and he had an incredible, passionate, compassionate mind bent on many of the biggest challenges that landscape architecture and the world at large face as humans succeed and/or fail to act as stewards.  

These things are, of course, very impressive. But beyond his gale-force brilliance, what stands out in my memory of Richard was a droll sense of humor, sometimes dark but always tempered with a very sincere appreciation for the absurd, the bizarre, and the ridiculous. He brought a keen, energetic attention to conversations, observations, and directions more regularly observed in search lights or a surgeon with scalpel in hand; and a pragmatic but no less generous kindness in how he approached the needs of students within a flawed institution (people, in a flawed reality), searching out the gaps and seeing to those that could be filled, above and beyond the university's existing tools or degree of concern.