Frederick R. Steiner | |
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Born | 1949 (age 74–75) Dayton, Ohio, U.S. |
Alma mater | University of Pennsylvania University of Cincinnati |
Occupation | Environmental Planner |
Frederick R. "Fritz" Steiner is an American ecologist who currently serves as the Dean and Paley Professor for the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, having succeeded Marilyn Jordan Taylor in 2016. [1] He is a fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects and the American Academy in Rome. He teaches courses in the areas of landscape analysis, landscape architecture theory, and environmental impact assessment. His specialization is in ecological planning, historic preservation, environmental design, green building, and regional planning.
Steiner earned his Bachelor of Science degree in graphic design from the University of Cincinnati in 1972, followed by a Master of Community Planning degree, also from Cincinnati, in 1975. In 1977, he earned his Master of Regional Planning from the University of Pennsylvania, and in 1986 he earned both his Master of Arts and Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning from Penn. At the time he was a student in the Penn Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning, it was chaired by Ian McHarg. As a Teaching Fellow at Penn in 1983, Steiner coordinated the LARP 501 studio with McHarg.
Formerly, he was Director of the School of Planning and Landscape Architecture, College of Architecture and Environmental Design at Arizona State University and previously taught at Washington State University, the University of Colorado-Denver, and the University of Pennsylvania. He was also awarded an honorary M.Phil. in Human Ecology from the College of the Atlantic. He has also served as a city planning commissioner and has worked with community groups, as well as national environmental and conservation organizations. He has been a visiting professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, and was a Fulbright-Hays research scholar at Wageningen University in The Netherlands.
He is the former dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin, having stepped down from the position of Dean in 2016 to lead the University of Pennsylvania School of Design. Following the announcement of his new position in February 2016, Steiner stated his decision to leave UT Austin had been influenced by Texas Government Code Section 411.2031, [2] which entitles licensed individuals to carry concealed handguns onto the campus of an institution of higher education--dubbed "Campus Carry." The Texas law went into effect on August 1, 2016.
In 2019, Steiner worked with Richard Weller, Karen M’Closkey, Billy Fleming, and William Whitaker to organize Design With Nature Now to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Ian McHarg's landmark book. The celebration involved a conference, three exhibitions, a book, and a special issue of the journal Socio-Ecological Practice Research.
Also in 2019, the University of Pennsylvania School of Design was renamed the Stuart Weitzman School of Design.
Landscape architecture is the design of outdoor areas, landmarks, and structures to achieve environmental, social-behavioural, or aesthetic outcomes. It involves the systematic design and general engineering of various structures for construction and human use, investigation of existing social, ecological, and soil conditions and processes in the landscape, and the design of other interventions that will produce desired outcomes.
Ken Yeang is an architect, ecologist, planner and author from Malaysia, best known for his ecological architecture and ecomasterplans that have a distinctive green aesthetic. He pioneered an ecology-based architecture, working on the theory and practice of sustainable design. The Guardian newspaper (2008) named him "one of the 50 people who could save the planet". Yeang's headquarters is in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) as Hamzah & Yeang, with offices in London (UK) as Llewelyn Davies Ken Yeang Ltd. and Beijing (China) as North Hamzah Yeang Architectural and Engineering Company.
Ian L. McHarg was a Scottish landscape architect and writer on regional planning using natural systems. McHarg was one of the most influential persons in the environmental movement who brought environmental concerns into broad public awareness and ecological planning methods into the mainstream of landscape architecture, city planning and public policy. He was the founder of the department of landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States. His 1969 book Design with Nature pioneered the concept of ecological planning. It continues to be one of the most widely celebrated books on landscape architecture and land-use planning. In this book, he set forth the basic concepts that were to develop later in geographic information systems.
Landscape planning is a branch of landscape architecture. According to Erv Zube (1931–2002) landscape planning is defined as an activity concerned with developing landscaping amongst competing land uses while protecting natural processes and significant cultural and natural resources. Park systems and greenways of the type designed by Frederick Law Olmsted are key examples of landscape planning. Landscape designers tend to work for clients who wish to commission construction work. Landscape planners analyze broad issues as well as project characteristics which constrain design projects.
Michael Robert Van Valkenburgh is an American landscape architect and educator. He has worked on a wide variety of projects – including public parks, college campuses, sculpture gardens, corporate landscapes, private gardens, and urban master plans – in the U.S., Canada, Europe and Asia. He has taught at Harvard's Graduate School of Design Since 1982 and served as chair of its Landscape Architecture Department from 1991 to 1996.
Sustainable landscape architecture is a category of sustainable design concerned with the planning and design of the built and natural environments.
Landscape urbanism is a theory of urban design arguing that the city is constructed of interconnected and ecologically rich horizontal field conditions, rather than the arrangement of objects and buildings. Landscape Urbanism, like Infrastructural Urbanism and Ecological Urbanism, emphasizes performance over pure aesthetics and utilizes systems-based thinking and design strategies. The phrase 'landscape urbanism' first appeared in the mid 1990s. Since this time, the phrase 'landscape urbanism' has taken on many different uses, but is most often cited as a postmodernist or post-postmodernist response to the "failings" of New Urbanism and the shift away from the comprehensive visions, and demands, for modern architecture and urban planning.
James Corner is a landscape architect and theorist whose works exhibit a focus on "developing innovative approaches toward landscape architectural design and urbanism." His designs of note include Fresh Kills Park on Staten Island and the High Line in Manhattan, and Domino Park in Brooklyn, all in New York City.
Karl Linn was an American landscape architect, psychologist, educator, and community activist, best known for inspiring and guiding the creation of "neighborhood commons" on vacant lots in East Coast inner cities during the 1960s through 1980s. Employing a strategy he called "urban barnraising," he engaged neighborhood residents, volunteer professionals, students, youth teams, social activists, and community gardeners in envisioning, designing, and constructing instant, temporary, and permanent gathering spaces in neighborhoods, on college campuses, and at sites of major conferences and events. "Linn is considered 'Father of American Participatory Architecture' by many academic colleagues and architectural and environmental experts of the National Endowment for the Arts."
Ecological design or ecodesign is an approach to designing products and services that gives special consideration to the environmental impacts of a product over its entire lifecycle. Sim Van der Ryn and Stuart Cowan define it as "any form of design that minimizes environmentally destructive impacts by integrating itself with living processes." Ecological design can also be defined as the process of integrating environmental considerations into design and development with the aim of reducing environmental impacts of products through their life cycle.
Mario Schjetnan is a Mexican architect and landscape architect that manages to "unite social concerns, aesthetics and, increasingly, ecology- all by way of interpreting and celebrating Mexico's rich and diverse culture." He is co-founder of the interdisciplinary firm Grupo de Diseño Urbano in Mexico City known for designs in which the building is subordinate to the landscape. Among his numerous awards are the Prince of Wales/Green Prize in Urban Design for Xochimilco Ecological Park and the ASLA President's Award for Excellence for Parque El Cedazo.
Geodesign is a set of concepts and methods used to involve all stakeholders and various professions in collaboratively designing and realizing the optimal solution for spatial challenges in the built and natural environments, utilizing all available techniques and data in an integrated process. Originally, geodesign was mainly applied during the design and planning phase. "Geodesign is a design and planning method which tightly couples the creation of design proposals with impact simulations informed by geographic contexts." Now, it is also used during realization and maintenance phases and to facilitate re-use of for example buildings or industrial areas. Geodesign includes project conceptualization, analysis, design specification, stakeholder participation and collaboration, design creation, simulation, and evaluation.
Kongjian Yu, is a landscape architect and urbanist, writer and educator, commonly credited with the invention of Sponge City concept, and winner of the International Federation of Landscape Architects’ Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe Award in 2020. Received his Doctor of Design Degree from Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1995, Doctor Honoris Causa from Sapienza University of Rome in 2017 and Honorary Doctorate from Norwegian University of Life Sciences in 2019, Yu was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016.
Philip Howard Lewis Jr. was an emeritus professor of landscape architecture who promoted the "environmental corridor" concept. He taught for more than 40 years at the University of Illinois (1953–1963) and the University of Wisconsin–Madison (1964–1994). Charles Little, author of Greenways for America, describes Lewis as the "...most inventive figure in regional landscape planning theory in the country".
'Negative Approach to Urban Planning', also known as "reversed planning" or simply "negative planning" is a landscape urbanism approach to urban planning. It is a new concept and terminology introduced by Chinese landscape architect, Professor of Peking University YU Kongjian. Yu argued that among other issues, the degrading environmental and ecological situations, low performance scrambled city form, and the loss of cultural identity in Beijing have proved that the conventional "population projection-urban infrastructure-land use" approach and the architectural urbanism approach to urban growth planning failed to meet the challenges of swift urbanisation and sustainability issues in China in general, and Beijing in particular. The negative approach defines an urban growth and urban form based on Ecological Infrastructure (EI). This approach has evolved from the pre-scientific model of Feng-shui as the sacred landscape setting for human settlement, the nineteenth century notion of greenways as urban recreational infrastructure, the early twentieth century idea of green belts as urban form makers, and the late twentieth century notion of ecological networks and EI as a biological preservation framework. EI is composed of critical landscape elements and structure that are strategically identified as Landscape Security Patterns to safeguard natural assets and ecosystems services, essential for sustaining human society. EI is strategically planned and developed using less land but more efficiently preserving the Ecosystem service. It distinguishes itself from other theories as it is practical way of solving urban and rural planning problems in quickly developing regions.
Anne Whiston Spirn is an American landscape architect, photographer and author. Her work promotes community-oriented spaces that are functional, sustainable, meaningful, and artful. Spirn is Cecil and Ida Green Distinguished Professor of Landscape Architecture and Planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning. She is the 2001 winner of the International Cosmos Prize.
Edmund David Hollander is an American landscape architect and educator. A New York City native, he is the president of Hollander Design Landscape Architects, a New York-based firm known for environmental planning, landscape design and horticulture. The firm provides services to residential, commercial and civic clients.
Laurel McSherry is an artist and Director of the Graduate Landscape Architecture Program at the Morgan State University School of Architecture and Planning in Baltimore. Previously, she was the graduate landscape architecture program director at Virginia Tech's Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center. Her design research work is award-winning and frequently focuses on rivers and their drainage basins.
Lucinda Sanders is CEO and partner at OLIN, a landscape architecture firm. She has had a leading role in many of OLIN's most recognized projects, and she shapes OLIN's goals of design and sustainability.
Billy Fleming is a landscape designer, city planner, and climate activist who currently serves as the Wilks Family Director of the Ian L. McHarg Center at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design. He is the founding director of the Center and is known for fusing climate justice and policy work with the landscape architecture and planning professions. He teaches, writes, lectures, and works on the intersection of climate change and the built environment, often through the policy framework known as the Green New Deal. He was one of the key instigators and organizers of the "Green New Deal Superstudio."