Landscape Architecture Archives - Page 10 of 11

Catherine De Almeida

Trained as a landscape architect and building architect, Catherine’s research examines the materiality and performance of waste landscapes through exploratory methods in design research and practice. Her work has ranged in scale from large bio-cultural and sacred indigenous landscapes, to site design and architectural work, to furniture design and materials research. Through her design work, research, teaching and engagement, she explores ways of creating multiplicity within a single entity, space, building or site to form greater efficiencies and performative capabilities in design. Since 2014, Catherine has developed her design research—landscape lifecycles—as a holistic approach that synthesizes multiple programs, forming hybrid assemblages in the transformation of waste landscapes and materials. She uses landscape lifecycles as a framework for investigating the performance, visibility, citizenships, emotions and injustices of waste materials and landscapes.

For several years, she was a researcher for the Materials Collection at Harvard University, where she analyzed and developed new methods for the lifecycle assessment of materials used in built environments. This led to a passion for incorporating the lifecycles of materials and sites in the multi-scalar design of waste landscapes. She was awarded a Penny White Fellowship to research the lifecycle and use of geothermal energy in Iceland, which led to her graduate thesis, “Energy Afterlife: Choreographing the Geothermal Gradient of Reykjanes, Iceland,” and has been published and presented in various outlets. More recently, she was awarded several grants to continue her research in Iceland, focused on the Blue Lagoon and its waste reuse strategies. She continues to expand this research through documenting case studies of waste landscapes that have evolved from bottom-up processes, advancing landscape lifecycles as a critical lens for evaluating the landscape performance of existing sites that engage with waste reuse.

Before joining the Department of Landscape Architecture at UW, Catherine was an Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she developed courses examining the multi-scalar implications of materiality and waste. Prior to this, Catherine was a lecturer at Cornell University where she taught undergraduate and graduate design studios focused on brownfield transformation. She was also an Associate at Whitham Planning and Design in Ithaca, New York where she worked as a landscape architect and planner on numerous urban infill projects, including the transformation of a deindustrialized Superfund site into a mixed-use district known as the Chain Works District.

Catherine received her MLA from Harvard University and her BARCH from Pratt Institute. She is a certified remote drone pilot, an Honorary Member of the Tau Sigma Delta Honor Society in Architecture and Allied Arts, and a Fellow of the Center for Great Plains Studies. Her work has been supported by numerous grants, and recognized in national and international publications and media outlets, including the Landscape Research Record, Journal of Landscape Architecture, and Journal of Architectural Education.

Sandy Fischer

Sandy’s career as a landscape architect and community planner has focused on exploring the intersections of art, ecology, landscape design and planning in theory and practice. For nearly 40 years she has advocated for livable communities, and shaped attractive places through design of enduring landscapes and creating spatial and policy plans addressing both conservation and development. She has managed her own successful consulting firms, held senior director positions in local government, and served as design and planning principal in large international and local consulting firms.

Sandy has a diverse and award winning design portfolio of projects including exquisite small gardens in the Pacific Northwest, various mixed use and resort projects in Asia, revitalized downtowns in rural communities in the Rocky Mountain region and embassies and campuses around the globe. Sandy has garnered numerous awards from professional and service organizations including American Society of Landscape Architects, The American Planning Association, the Governor of the State of Washington, The Puget Sound Regional Council and National Association of Environmental Professionals. Her work has been published in Landscape Architecture Magazine, Rural Towns Symposium, Scenic America Best of the West, Geological Society of America and others. Sandy currently serves on two Local Art Committees and two professionals Councils at the University of Washington College of the Built Environment; Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning and Design.

She is a former board member of State of Montana Licensing and Air Quality Boards, the State of Michigan Arts Council, Washington Association of Landscape Architects Board of Directors, Council of Landscape Architects Registration Board Examination Committee. After graduating from Michigan State with degrees in Art and Landscape Architecture, Sandy practiced in Ann Arbor and Lansing prior to beginning her migration west by way of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, Montana, and Seattle. In 2003 she settled on Bainbridge Island with her husband, a photographer and technologist and their two sons; Dylan and Sean who are both emerging designers of products and technology. Sandy studied at the Bainbridge Graduate Institute; the first program in the US to offer an MBA in Sustainable Business. Intellectually curious and a non-conformist by nature, Sandy is intrigued by cross discipline collaborations. With Richard, she continues and debate and explore the intersections of landscape architecture, horticulture, design, ecology and technology in her practice, community service, research, art, writing and personal garden.

Laure Heland

Laure Heland is Affiliate Associate Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture. She has been teaching as an Associate Professor at the National School of Architecture of Paris La Villette (France) since 2007. As research faculty she participated in several national and European public funded research programs on participatory process for sustainable design and the assessment of environmental and climate change policies at regional, local and building scales.

Trained in Ecology, Urban Design and Planning, she developed her professional experience in environmental consulting and training for professionals, local authorities and regional governments. She earned her PhD in 2008, studying the neighborhood as a place for emergence, experimentation and appropriation of sustainable development, through bottom-up ecological practices and community-led participatory design.

Laure’s current research focuses on the Pacific Northwest experience and leadership on stormwater management at different scales, and more generally the social, ecological and economical consequences of implementing ecological infrastructure in dense urban environments. She is analyzing their impact on local communities, on the praxis of design professionals, and the management of ecological systems over the long term through the collaboration of various actors: local communities, NGOs, public and private professionals and agencies.

She also explores community-led ecological design projects and participatory process in various socio-cultural contexts. She is teaching a fall seminar on Perceptions of Nature in dense urban environments and she collaborated with the past two McKinley BE Studios on
interdisciplinary teaching pedagogy.

Manish Chalana

Chalana engages urban planning through the lenses of urban design, historic preservation, urban & planning history and equity & social justice. He has degrees in Architecture (B’Arch –Mangalore University; M’Arch from the School of Planning & Architecture, New Delhi), Landscape Architecture (M’Larch from Penn State) and Urban Planning (Ph.D. from University of Colorado). Besides his appointment in Urban Design & Planning at UW, he is adjunct in the Departments of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, and a member of the South Asia Program in the Jackson School of International Studies (JSIS). Before teaching at UW, he taught as a graduate student/ lecturer in the University of Colorado and Pennsylvania State University. He has worked in India with the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) and Housing and Urban Development Corporation of India (HUDCO). Additionally, he consults on international projects mostly around historic preservation. He is one of the two founding directors of the Center for Preservation and Adaptive Reuse (CPAR), which strives to connect academia to practice of historic preservation. He is also affiliated with both the Graduate Certificates in Urban Design and Historic Preservation and both the PhD programs in our College; PhD in the Built Environment; and the Interdisciplinary PhD in Urban Planning.

He has offered a variety of courses ranging from study abroad; lectures; seminars and studios. He teaches graduate seminars in American Urban History and Introduction to Historic Preservation. Additionally, he teaches Urban Form and Communication and Analysis in the MUP core curriculum; and the Race and Social Justice Seminar. His studios have typically been on urban design and historic preservation topics engaging sites in the Pacific Northwest. For his study abroad classes, he has brought students for a quarter long programs to Chandigarh, India (co-led with Prakash) and month long exploration seminars to the Kumaon region in the upper Himalayas to study topics of urban design, planning and preservation. He has also co-taught study abroad classes in China and Japan along with his colleagues Dan Abramson and Bob Freitag on topics of hazard mitigation and cultural resilience, among others. He has been twice honored with the CBE’s Lionel Pries Distinguished Professor Award.

He is interested in topics of diversity and social justice in the context of historic preservation and urban planning. He engages these topics in his teaching and through my service. As a member of the Historic Preservation Advisory Committee (HPAC) of the 4Culture, Cultural Services Agency for King County, he mentors the diversity intern who works on uncovering systemic biases in the listing of historic sites in King County to the exclusion of under-represented minority communities. He has served on the UW Diversity Council’s Campus Climate Committee, which encouraged him to start the UDP department’s Diversity Committee (with Branden Born) that has worked for the last 10 years toward creating a welcoming environment for the underrepresented minority students in the College of Built Environments. Additionally, he has volunteered to serve on a committee of the National Council of Preservation Educators (NCPE) to understand the diversity of students enrolled in preservation programs in the country to better understand the accessibility and openness of the programs to underrepresented minority students.

He publishes on topics of urban design, planning history and preservation in a variety of journal including Future Anterior, Journal of Architectural Education, Journal of American Planning Association, Journal of Planning History and Planning Perspectives. He has co-edited a book on the topic of urbanism in Asia (along with Jeff Hou) – Messy Urbansim: understanding the “other” cities of Asia. He recently completed working on another edited volume (along with Ashima Krishna) on the status of preservation practice in India.

Rachel Berney

Berney’s primary interests include community sustainable design and development in an international context; urban design and planning history and theory with an emphasis on social and environmental factors; and qualitative and quantitative research methods for evaluating the efficacy of urban form, including challenges of cross-cultural research. Specifically, she focuses on the history and contemporary conditions of urbanism and development in the Americas, with an emphasis on public space and the public realm. In particular, she examines the narrative roles that built landscapes play in: politics and society, ecology, and human health and well-being. Thus, first, her work on pedagogical urbanism in Latin America and the United States examines the use of public space to front city regeneration projects. Second, her work on visible ecology critiques and directs the development of eco-literacy in community design and development practices. Finally, her work on human health and well-being is currently being developed through her Mobile Cities project centered on public space investment and community mobility planning in metro transit station projects. These themes are linked by a focus on understanding, reading, critiquing, and modifying narratives in the built environment. Of particular interest is the concept of legibility, or comprehensibility, and whether legible environments are capable of shaping sustainable urban places, practices, and policies.

Dan Abramson

Dan Abramson approaches the discipline of planning through urban design, historic preservation and planning history, methods of socio-spatial analysis and public participation, and qualitative study of the politics and cultures of development decision-making. His experience in community-engaged planning, research, and design – mostly with immigrant, low-income, indigenous, or otherwise marginalized communities – ranges from Boston to the American and Canadian Pacific Northwest, and from Poland to China and Japan.

Currently Abramson focuses on community resilience and adaptive planning in disaster recovery and hazard mitigation, as well as periurban and rural responses to rapid urbanization. Students at all levels of undergraduate and graduate education join his work, through course projects, community-engaged studios as well as thesis and dissertation research. Projects in Asia have included six China Village Studios with academic partners from Chengdu and Taiwan; a six-month Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship in recovery planning after the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake in Sichuan; and a collaboration with Kobe University to use participatory GIS for urban neighborhood earthquake recovery. Projects in Washington integrate studios with FEMA- and NSF-funded research on new protocols for state agencies and communities to envision earthquake- and tsunami-resilient development.

Beside his appointment in Urban Design & Planning at UW, he is adjunct in the Departments of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, and a member of the China Studies and Canadian Studies faculty. Before teaching at UW, he held a Killam Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of British Columbia’s Centre for Human Settlements, where he initiated the first Ford Foundation-funded urban community-based planning project in China, in Quanzhou, Fujian. His degrees include a B.A. in History from Harvard University; dual masters in Architecture and City Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and a doctorate in Urban Planning from Tsinghua University in Beijing. (He was the first American to earn a degree in urban planning from a Chinese university, and possibly the first American to earn any mainland Chinese graduate-level degree.) In 2005-2009, he served as Secretary on the founding Board of the International Association for China Planning (IACP) and remains an active member. He have also served on the editorial board of the Journal of the American Planning Association and am currently an editorial board member for Planning Perspectives.

Julie Parrett

While focusing on public urban projects in professional practice and teaching, Julie’s work explores landscape architecture as a practice that incorporates innovative landscape and ecological strategies as a framework and model for designing dynamic landscapes which evolve over time. At the base of this approach are the fundamentals of design – the physical and spatial qualities created. The challenge is to create places that are articulate, site specific and well-crafted while remaining adaptive and open.

Currently as a Lecturer in the Dept of Landscape Architecture at the University of Washington, Julie’s teaching investigates connections between reading and seeing landscapes and design methodology. As a practicing landscape architect, Julie heads a small consultancy firm and has previous professional experience developing award-winning and visionary large-scale public sites and urban planning projects as well as intimate neighborhood parks. As Design Director for the People’s Waterfront Coalition, an organization she helped to co-found, she developed an award-winning proposal for re-envisioning Seattle’s downtown waterfront without the Alaskan Way Viaduct as a dynamic water’s edge with parks, beaches, recreation paths, event space and an urban street integrated into a functional shore ecology, and a transportation solution that supports a sustainable and livable future city.

In addition to the University of Washington, Julie has taught landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. She holds a MLA from the University of Pennsylvania, BS in Architecture from the University of Virginia and was a Fellow with CHORA Institute of Architecture and Urbanism in London. Additionally, Julie currently sits on the Seattle Design Commission and Seattle’s Public Art Advisory Council.

Ken Yocom

Ken Yocom is the Interim Dean of the College of Built Environments and a Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture. He also has an adjunct appointment in the Department of Urban Design and Planning, serves on the steering committee of the PhD in the Built Environments Program, and is core faculty for the Interdisciplinary PhD Program in Urban Design and Planning within the College of Built Environments. He primarily teaches seminar and studio courses in theory, ecology, and urban design.

Trained as an ecologist and landscape architect with professional experience in the environmental consulting and construction industries, he is a graduate of our MLA program (2002). Ken also earned his PhD from the Program in the Built Environments (2007), where he researched nature and society relations through the contemporary context of urban ecological restoration practices.

Ken’s current research, teaching, and practice explore the convergence of urban infrastructure and ecological systems through adaptive design approaches that serve to demystify emerging strategies and technologies for sustainable and resilient development. More specifically, he investigates how water –in all its forms- shapes the past to future functions and patterns of our built environments. He has written extensively on the themes developed from his work including two books, Ecological Design (with Nancy Rottle, Bloomsbury, 2012) and NOW Urbanism: The Future City is Here (with Jeff Hou, Ben Spencer, and Thaisa Way (editors), Routledge, 2014). He has also written for professional practice and scholarly publications on issues of global biodiversity, urban environmental governance, ecological design, and contemporary nature and society relations in the urban context.

In his teaching, Ken emphasizes the development of a holistic and integrated approach that embraces the complexity of our built environments, yet discreetly explores the intersections and overlaps that frame our understanding and appreciation of particular places. He has a strong belief that collaboratively, the allied design professions can act as catalysts in recognizing, utilizing, and transforming the inherent potential of our built environments into places that are socially equitable, environmentally just, and economically sustainable.

Daniel Winterbottom

Daniel Winterbottom, RLA, FASLA, a landscape architect with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Tufts University and a Master of Landscape Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Washington. His firm, Winterbottom Design Inc., focuses their practice on healing/restorative gardens. His research interests include the landscape as a cultural expression, ecological urban design and the role of restorative/healing landscapes in the built environment. He has been published widely in Northwest Public Health, Places, the New York Times, Seattle Times, Seattle P.I., Landscape Architecture Magazine. He has authored “Wood in the Landscape” and has contributed to several books on sustainable design, community gardens, therapeutic landscapes and community service learning.

He has developed several programs including the participatory design design/build program in 1995 where with his students he works with communities to design and build projects that address the social and ecological concerns of the community. He has completed projects in Seattle, New York City, Bedford Hills New York, Mexico, Guatemala, Bosnia/Herzegovina and Croatia. In 2006 he developed the Healing Garden Certificate program at the University of Washington.

Nancy Rottle

Professor Nancy Rottle brings over two decades of landscape architecture professional experience to her role at the UW, where she has been teaching since 2001. Her work centers upon design as a means to create places that are ecologically healthy, culturally meaningful, and educationally and experientially resonant. Her recent scholarship, including the co-authored book Ecological Design, has focused on the application of theory and new practices to regenerate the health of urban and urbanizing environments.

Professor Rottle currently directs the UW’s Green Futures Research and Design Lab, which addresses questions and projects related to urban green infrastructure, topics on which Nancy publishes and lectures (www.greenfutures.washington.edu). Collaborative projects and publications include the use of waterfronts to treat and re-use stormwater; urban green infrastructure for city streets and college campuses; public space planning and design; pedestrian and active transport environments; green roofs and walls; metrics to evaluate sustainable design projects; public engagement to envision positive futures; and the role of green infrastructure in mitigating and adapting to climate change. She co-edited the 2007 special journal edition of Places on Climate Change and Place, and researched this topic in New Zealand supported by a Senior Scholar Fulbright Fellowship.

Professor Rottle teaches design studio, theory and technical courses and advises on theses that examine the potential of design to positively affect our urban ecological futures, taking a special focus on public space design, water in the landscape and design for environmental literacy. Professor Rottle regularly teaches courses that integrate water into the planning and design process, from watershed to site scales, integrating knowledge of urban water-based projects from around the world. With support from the ScanlDesign Foundation, she leads urban design study tours to Denmark and Sweden, and collaborates with Gehl Architects of Copenhagen to teach interdisciplinary studios at the UW that merge considerations for ecological, economic, social and physical health. As the UW’s ScanlDesign Endowed Chair in Built Environments she also facilitates internships and exchanges between the UW and Denmark.

A registered landscape architect, Nancy’s professional and academic planning and design projects have won local and national awards, including the acclaimed Cedar River Watershed Education Center, and Open Space Seattle 2100, a multidisciplinary planning process to develop a 100-year vision for Seattle’s green infrastructure. Her studios, thesis students and work of the Green Futures Lab have also won prestigious college, local, national and international awards. Passionate about sharing ecological design approaches and models, Nancy has lectured in the US, New Zealand, China, Canada, Russia and Europe.