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.
Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) is the architecture school of Columbia University, a private research university in New York City. It is also home to the Masters of Science program in Advanced Architectural Design, Historic Preservation, Real Estate Development, Urban Design, and Urban Planning.
Cornelia Hahn Oberlander LL.D. was a German-born Canadian landscape architect. Her firm, Cornelia Hahn Oberlander Landscape Architects, was founded in 1953, when she moved to Vancouver.
Sustainable landscape architecture is a category of sustainable design concerned with the planning and design of the built and natural environments.
The Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization located in Gowanus, Brooklyn, New York City that works to improve the quality of public participation in urban planning and community design.
Richard Misrach is an American photographer. He has photographed the deserts of the American West, and pursued projects that document the changes in the natural environment that have been wrought by various man-made factors such as urban sprawl, tourism, industrialization, floods, fires, petrochemical manufacturing, and the testing of explosives and nuclear weapons by the military. Curator Anne Wilkes Tucker writes that Misrach's practice has been "driven [by] issues of aesthetics, politics, ecology, and sociology." In a 2011 interview, Misrach noted: "My career, in a way, has been about navigating these two extremes - the political and the aesthetic."
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.
Mitchell Joachim is an architect and urban designer. He is the Co-Founder of Terreform ONE, and a Professor of Practice at NYU. Previously he was the Frank Gehry Chair at University of Toronto and a faculty member at Pratt, Columbia, Syracuse, Washington, The New School, and the European Graduate School.
Ecological urbanism draws from ecology to inspire an urbanism that is more socially inclusive and sensitive to the environment. It is less ideologically driven than green urbanism or sustainable urbanism. In many ways, ecological urbanism is an evolution and a critique of landscape urbanism, which argues for a more holistic approach to the design and management of cities. This type of urbanism has a central scope of four main objectives: compactness, complexity, efficiency, and stability. This model of urbanism strives to tackle the current challenges of society by intertwining sustainability and urban occupation models. "Ecological urbanism" was coined by architect and planner Miguel Ruano in his 1998 book Eco-Urbanism: Sustainable Human Settlements, 60 Case Studies. The term first appeared as "EcoUrbanism", which is defined as "the development of multi-dimensional sustainable human communities within harmonious and balanced built environments". The term was used later in April 2003 at a conference at the University of Oregon, and again in 2006 in a paper by Jeffrey Hou. Mohsen Mostafavi used the term in the 2007 publication Intervention Architecture and in a lecture at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Today, ecological urbanism is recognized as a formal academic research topic. Notably, the Harvard University Graduate School of Design has conducted a conference, held an art exhibition, and published a book all centered around ecological urbanism.
Susannah Hagan, FRSA is the founding Director of R_E_D and Professor and School Research Leader at the Royal College of Art School of Architecture. She has written and lectured extensively on the theory and practice of environmental design, in particular, environmentally led urban design. Hagan's major publications include City Fights: Debates on Sustainable Cities ; Taking Shape: A New Contract between Architecture and Nature ; and Digitalia: Architecture and the Environmental, the Digital and the Avant-garde.
Ecological art is an art genre and artistic practice that seeks to preserve, remediate and/or vitalize the life forms, resources and ecology of Earth. Ecological art practitioners do this by applying the principles of ecosystems to living species and their habitats throughout the lithosphere, atmosphere, biosphere, and hydrosphere, including wilderness, rural, suburban and urban locations. Ecological art is a distinct genre from Environmental art in that it involves functional ecological systems-restoration, as well as socially engaged, activist, community-based interventions. Ecological art also addresses politics, culture, economics, ethics and aesthetics as they impact the conditions of ecosystems. Ecological art practitioners include artists, scientists, philosophers and activists who often collaborate on restoration, remediation and public awareness projects.
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.
Terreform ONE is a 501c3 non-profit architecture and urban think tank that advances ecological design in derelict municipal areas. By formulating unsolicited feasibility studies and egalitarian designs, their mission is to illustrate speculative environmental plans for New York City and other cities worldwide. Their intention is to support community outreach and master plan solutions in underprivileged areas that do not have direct access to qualified architects and urban designers.
Cheryl Barton is an American landscape architect and founding principal of the San Francisco-based Office of Cheryl Barton. A Fellow and Past President of the American Society of Landscape Architects, she has completed a wide range of national and international projects in the US, Europe, Singapore, Abu Dhabi, and Bolivia. Her work includes national and local public parks, urban open spaces and master plans, cultural landscapes, college and institutional campuses, public art installations, corporate landscapes, and ecological master plans. Barton has received an Individual Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rome Prize in Landscape Architecture from the American Academy in Rome. She was featured in the 2012 documentary, Women in the Dirt.
Edwina von Gal is an American landscape designer based in East Hampton, New York. Her firm, Edwina von Gal + Co founded in 1984, is based in East Hampton, NY and focuses on natural, sustainable designs. She has worked with numerous architects, designers and art world luminaries, among them Maya Lin, Annabelle Selldorf, Richard Gluckman, Richard Meier, Larry Gagosian, Cindy Sherman, David Maupin, Stefano Tonchi, Calvin Klein, and Richard Serra. She designed the park for Panama's Biomuseo, with Frank Gehry. Her approach emphasizes sustainability, natural landscapes, and the use of native species.
Susannah Drake is a practicing architect and landscape architect who specializes in addressing contemporary social and environmental issues through design.
Nina-Marie Lister is Professor and Graduate Director of the School of Urban and Regional Planning at Toronto Metropolitan University, where she also leads the Ecological Design Lab. In 2021, she was appointed a Senior Fellow of Massey College. From 2010 to 2014, she was a Visiting associate professor of landscape architecture and urban planning at Harvard Graduate School of Design. Her career has spanned private and public-sector work, integrating ecological science with planning and design. As both a researcher and a practitioner, she is founding principal of PLANDFORM, a creative design practice. Lister's work focuses on the intersection of landscape infrastructure and ecological processes in metropolitan areas.
Susan Child (1928–2018) was an American landscape architect. She completed many residential, public, and historic preservation projects in New England.
The OBEL AWARD is a global award presented annually to honour "recent and outstanding architectural contributions to human development all over the world."
Julia Watson is an Australian born author, researcher, lecturer, and landscape designer based in New York City. Watson is an expert on nature-based indigenous technologies and focuses her work at the intersection of anthropology, ecology and innovation. She is the founder and principal of Julia Watson Studio, a landscape and urban design studio, and co-director of A Future Studio, a collective of eco-conscious designers.
