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.
Lab/Center: Urban@UW
Ken Yocom
Ken Yocom is Department Chair and 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.
Lynne Manzo
Lynne Manzo, PhD, is a Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture. She teaches in both the BLA and MLA programs. Dr. Manzo is also an Affiliate Faculty member in the PhD Program in the Built Environment and the Interdisciplinary PhD Program in Urban Design and Planning, and an Adjunct Professor in the UW School of Social Work.
As an Environmental Psychologist by training, Manzo specializes in the study of the interrelationships between people and their physical surroundings. Her view of the environment includes not only natural and built settings, but also the socio-cultural and political milieu that shape the appearance, meanings and uses of space.
Manzo’s interests and areas of research focus on people-place relationship in urban space through a social justice lens, with particular attention to place attachment, place meaning & identity, as well as the politics of place. She has spent years conducting housing research and participating in advocacy efforts for affordable housing. This includes investigations of grassroots organizing and building rehabilitation efforts among residents of landlord-abandoned buildings in Harlem and the South Bronx, and conducting research for the Seattle Housing Authority, the King County Housing Authority and the Bremerton Housing Authority to understand the impacts of public housing demolition and redevelopment on low-income communities.
Currently, Manzo’s work focuses on place change, displacement and anti-displacement strategies. In one of her research projects, she is working with the non-profit, community-based organization Wa Na Wari, which “creates space for Black homeownership, possibility, belonging, and artistic creativity” in Seattle’s historically Black Central District, to conduct research that supports their ongoing anti-displacement organizing work. Related to this, in the Spring of 2020, Manzo led an advanced, graduate-level research studio on anti-displacement strategies with King County as the client, focusing on the diverse communities of Skyway-West Hill and White Center/North Highline (report forthcoming). These majority minority communities are currently under serious threat of gentrification and displacement.
Julie Johnson
Associate Professor Julie Johnson teaches in the BLA and MLA Programs, focusing on the design, use and participatory design processes of civic landscapes, including children’s outdoor learning environments, urban parks, and neighborhoods. She views childhood experiences as key to fostering a more ecologically literate society and more sustainable future. Her research and teaching explore how design processes can engage children in the shaping and stewarding of innovative and enriching places. Similarly, she is interested in how the design of neighborhoods and urban open space can support community life and ecological processes, where transit and mixed uses enable greater choice and walkability. She is co-author of Greening Cities, Growing Communities: Learning from Urban Community Gardens in Seattle (2009). She has traveled around the world and lived in different parts of the US, but loves calling Seattle (and Gould Hall) home.
Julie is an adjunct associate professor in the Department of Architecture and a faculty member of the College’s Urban Design Certificate Program. She has a Bachelor of Landscape Architecture from Utah State University and a Master of City Planning from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Julie is a registered Landscape Architect in Washington. Her professional experience includes urban and landscape design in firms, a public agency, and a university-based center.
Rick Mohler
Richard E. (Rick) Mohler, AIA, NCARB, is a licensed architect and Professor of Architecture at the University of Washington where he teaches graduate level design studios and professional practice. Professor Mohler will assume the role of Chair of the Department of Architecture beginning in June 2023. He received his B.A. and Master of Architecture degrees from the University of Pennsylvania where he received top awards for design and master’s thesis. Following graduation he worked for firms in Philadelphia including Mitchell Giurgola and Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown where he was a member of the winning competition team for the extension to the National Gallery in London.
In 1986 he joined the University of Washington architecture faculty and Olson Sundberg Architects (now Olson Kundig). In 1991, he co-founded Adams/Mohler Architects (now Mohler + Ghillino Architects), a firm engaged in residential, commercial adaptive re-use, and commercial interior design projects that has been recognized through numerous design awards and publications. With his own firm, other firms and individuals he has been recognized in urban design and housing competitions in Philadelphia, Seattle and Montreal. His own house and accessory dwelling unit, the Flip/Flop House(s), was recognized with multiple Seattle AIA awards and named one of the top ten innovative houses of 2010 by Builder magazine.
Professor Mohler maintains that the nexus of land use, affordable housing, transportation and the public realm is key to a sustainable future. He has explored urban issues through multiple UW interdisciplinary design studios focused on land use legislation, transit oriented development and the future of urban form in Seattle and surrounding communities. His current research focuses on housing affordability at three scales – the urban parcel, the city and the region. In pursuing this research Rick strives to be a bridge between the city, profession and academy. He is a member of the Seattle Planning Commission and Seattle’s ADU working group, co-chairs the AIA Seattle Public Policy Board and was a 2015 Affiliate Fellow of the UW Runstad Center for Real Estate Studies.
Rick is an enthusiastic and effective design studio instructor whose students have been recognized in regional, national and international design awards programs and competitions eighteen times and a dozen times in the past decade. He is active in professional, civic and community organizations including serving as founding co-chair of the AIA Seattle Future Shack program, which recognizes innovative housing solutions, and has served as a juror, moderator and co-chair of AIA Honor Awards programs throughout the country. He is a UW representative to the City/University Community Advisory Committee, was vice president and land use chair of the Madrona Community Council, a founding member of the housing advocacy group Welcoming Wallingford, a design committee member of the Friends of McDonald School Playground and received a mayoral appointment to the Downtown Project Review Panel for Seattle’s CAP Initiative.