News + Events

The McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology is thrilled to announce the selection of the 2025-2026 McHarg Fellow, Tami Banh!

Tami is a Vietnamese architect and landscape architect based in New York City. Her work explores ways of restructuring relationships between people and the environment through design, building, writing, and making. Focused on critical representation, climate resilience, and human / more-than-human cohabitation, her research and practice engage with landscapes at the intersection of ecology, infrastructure, and community resilience.

Tami’s current research project, “Shared Waters, Divided Landscapes,” explores how cultural landscapes, governance frameworks, and ecological practices shape the Mekong River across national boundaries, examining how policies, traditional knowledge, and representations of the river influence its physical and cultural transformations. Through field and archival research, comparative study, and community engagement, the work explores alternative frameworks for understanding and designing within contested and dynamic waterscapes.

Previously, as an Associate at SCAPE Landscape Architecture, Tami has led and supported public landscape infrastructure projects that integrate placemaking, ecological design, and social impact such as Living Breakwaters and Hudson Highlands Fjord Trail. She also served as an Associate Adjunct Professor in the Urban Design program at Columbia University and has worked at SHoP and ZGF Architects. Tami holds a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Southern California and a Master of Architecture and Master of Landscape Architecture with Distinction from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design.

Tami will follow our exceptional 2024-2025 McHarg Fellow, Leah Kahler, who will present the culmination of a year of teaching and research on Thursday, April 24 at 6.30pm in the Upper Gallery of Meyerson Hall. Leah’s research and spring seminar “Clones, Zones, and Migrants” explore the socioecological legacies and implications of the plantation landscape and the American nursery industry, focused on sites of labor, extraction, and production.

We’re looking forward to the year ahead as Tami Banh joins the Weitzman community and as Leah Kahler moves on to her next exciting chapter!

McHarg Fellowship

The McHarg Fellowship is a teaching and research award given by the McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology to an emerging voice in landscape architecture.

The Fellowship is awarded competitively on an annual basis and the selected fellow is expected to be in residence at the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, full-time for one academic year.

The purpose of the Fellowship is to create a unique opportunity for an emerging professional and/or academic who would benefit most from support to conduct research, to teach, and to be mentored by faculty during the term of the Fellowship.
 

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.

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.
 

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.