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 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

To add your voice, 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, Department 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.