News + Events

Jeffrey S Nesbit is an architect, urbanist, founding director of the research group Grounding Design. His work focuses on processes of urbanization, infrastructure, and the evolution of "technical lands." His experience spanning over a decade includes leading design teams for public architecture and large-scale urban projects, along with leading sponsored design research projects for city governments, local institutions, and NGOs. He is author of several books on infrastructure and urbanization, including Ground Control: A Design History of Technical Lands and NASA’s Space Complex (Routledge, 2024), Technical Lands: A Critical Primer (Jovis, 2023), and Nature of Enclosure (Actar, 2022).  Nesbit is currently assistant professor in history and theory of architecture and urbanism in the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University.

Architectures and Ecologies of Amazonia is an interdisciplinary international symposium and exhibition highlighting the agencies that have shaped and are shaped by Amazonia. Threatened by deforestation, fire, and drought, the Amazon rainforest, which spans nine countries, is home to more than thirty million people. It is the ancestral homeland of more than one million Indigenous peoples and supports the greatest concentration of biodiversity on Earth. In the face of the widespread socio-environmental challenges we currently face, along with the existential threat of crossing the environmental tipping point of the Amazon rainforest, the symposium aims to share lessons that the study of the Amazon can teach us about climate action, coexistence, and the built environment. 

The symposium was organized by Vanessa Grossman, Assistant Professor, Department of Architecture, and Catherine Seavitt, Meyerson Professor of Urbanism and Chair, Department of Landscape Architecture, in collaboration with Fernando Lara, Professor, Department of Architecture and Kristina Lyons, Associate Professor of Anthropology. A parallel exhibition of student work is on display in the Mezzanine Gallery of Meyerson Hall through May 1, 2025. The exhibition is designed by Jonathan Bonezzi and Ryan Lane Thomas.

Architectures and Ecologies of Amazonia is co-hosted by the Department of Architecture, the Department of Landscape Architecture, and the McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology. The symposium also received generous support from several programs and initiatives across the University, including the Perry World House International Visitors Grant Program, the Department of Anthropology, the Center for Experimental Ethnography, the Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies, and Native American and Indigenous Studies at Penn.

Michelle Delk, the Laurie Olin Professor of Practice in Landscape Architecture at Penn and partner with Snøhetta in New York City, will deliver the inaugural Anne Whiston Spirn Lecture. Delk’s lecture, Snøhetta Landscapes, will focus on her recent work with the firm, where she leads the landscape architecture practice in the Americas.

Delk’s work is evocative of a foundational premise shared with Snøhetta: to create places that enhance the positive relationships between people and their environments. Both aspirational and pragmatic, she seeks to discover and expand the urban landscape vernacular, striving to express the subtleties of place through the incongruities of memory, envi¬ronment, and social perceptions. Delk is a Fellow with the American Society of Landscape Architects, a board member with New York’s Urban Design Forum, and a member of the Cultural Landscape Foundation Stewardship Council.

The Anne Whiston Spirn Lecture is presented annually by The Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology to showcase a practitioner or scholar in the field of landscape architecture whose work expands the disciplinary boundaries of research and practice. Housed in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design, The McHarg Center was launched in 2019 as a transdisciplinary platform for collaborative research supporting the future of life on Earth. The lecture honors Anne Whiston Spirn (MLA’74), a Penn alumna who led the Department of Landscape Architecture as chair from 1986-1994 and whose work inspires deeper engagements with people and planet.

Thursday, February 6, 2025

6:30 pm - 8:00 pm

Kleinman Energy Forum, Fisher Fine Arts Library, 4th Floor, 220 South 34th Street, Philadelphia

If you require any accessibility accommodation, such as live captioning, audio description, or a sign language interpreter, please email news@design.upenn.edu. Please note, we require at least five (5) business days’ notice.
 

We are very excited to share the news that award-winning landscape architect, researcher, and educator Rebecca Popowsky has been named the Wilks Family Director of The McHarg Center, effective January 1.

Rebecca has a long history with Penn, having earned her MLA and MArch degrees here in 2010. She most recently served as a research associate and the OLIN Labs coordinator at the internationally renowned landscape architecture firm OLIN, where she co-led its internal research practice since 2018. Developing innovations in waste-based material design and construction, soils engineering, and practice-based research models, she established partnerships in the public, private, nonprofit, and academic sectors. In her capacity as landscape designer at OLIN, Rebecca contributed to a wide range of design, planning, and construction projects. She joined the Penn faculty in 2015 and has taught core and advanced design studios and professional practice courses in the Department of Landscape Architecture. Rebecca succeeds Billy Fleming, who was instrumental in conceiving and producing many of the Center’s public programs and contributed to numerous research initiatives, including as co-editor of Design with Nature Now, which was recently published in Chinese and traditional Chinese translations. Billy has been appointed assistant professor of landscape architecture in the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University, where he joins several other Penn alumni on the faculty there.