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Urban Nature: a landscape architecture perspective
Faculty for the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design and the McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology will present the state of the art of thinking and research about landscape architecture’s role in re-imagining the role of nature in the contemporary city.
With:
Catherine Seavitt, Chair, Department of Landscape Architecture, Martin and Margy Meyerson Professor of Urbanism, Faculty Co-Director, The McHarg Center
Matthijs Bouw, Professor of Practice in Landscape Architecture / Architecture, Fellow for Risk and Resilience, The McHarg Center
Rebecca Popowsky, Wilks Family Director, The McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology
David Gouverneur, Associate Professor of Practice in Landscape Architecture / City Planning
Yadan Luo, Lecturer, co-founder YH LAB
McHarg Center Perspectives Launch
Join us to celebrate the first installment of Perspectives interviews. This event will feature presentations from LARP faculty and their McHarg Center research assistants, followed by a student-led panel discussion. Come hear about recent work from fellow students and faculty and share ideas.
EMLab Honored with ASLA Professional Research Award for “Tides of Change: Adaptive Management for Coastal Salt Marshes”
The American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) has recognized the McHarg Center's Environmental Modeling Lab (EMLab) with an Honor Award in the Professional Research Category for their project Tides of Change: Adaptive Management for Coastal Salt Marshes. The research team, led by EMLab Co-Directors Sean Burkholder and Keith VanDerSys, and in partnership with the Wetland Institute, is working with federal and state agencies to model and monitor six wetland restoration sites totaling 500 acres along coastal New Jersey. This work aims to create high-resolution models to determine sediment placement and track salt marsh elevation and vegetation composition over time.
The multi-year, transdisciplinary project has been supported by EMLab’s student research assistants Mariya Lupandina, Clarasophia Gust, Zicheng Zhao, Shuyi Hao, and Aaron O’Neil, and Research Associate Lucy Salwen.
Read EMLAb’s recently published Q&A in the McHarg Center’s Perspectives series, here.
Before a Plant Arrives on Site
Landscape designer and researcher Leah Kahler has been appointed the 2024-2025 McHarg Fellow in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the Weitzman School. Kahler is a landscape designer and researcher whose work is motivated by justice-oriented storytelling though the lens of landscape. Her research explores the socioecological legacies of the plantation landscape, focused on sites of labor, extraction, and production in the American South.
Kahler received a Master of Landscape Architecture from the University of Virginia, where her research as a Benjamin C. Howland fellow explored the possibilities of an abolition ecology through speculative fiction at the site currently known as the Louisiana State Penitentiary. She was a 2021 Landscape Architecture Foundation Olmsted Scholar finalist, and she received the LAF Honor Scholarship in Memory of Joe Lalli, FASLA.
Kahler joins Weitzman from Reed Hilderbrand's practice in Boston, where she played a key role in the design and construction of a 24-acre public park on the Tennessee River in Knoxville. Kahler has also taught landscape architectural representation at Boston Architectural College. No stranger to Philadelphia, she holds a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology and the Growth and Structure of Cities from Bryn Mawr College.
Housed in the Department of Landscape Architecture at Weitzman, The McHarg Center was founded in 2017 as an interdisciplinary platform for faculty research, teaching, and advocacy supporting the future of our planet.