News + Events

November in the McHarg Center

November in the McHarg Center

January 19, 2019

Richard Weller co-authors a report on biodiversity with The Nature Conservancy, Matthijs Bouw participates in 'The Hackable City', and Design With Nature Now begins to take shape.

With a Green New Deal, Here's What the World Could Look Like for the Next Generation

With a Green New Deal, Here's What the World Could Look Like for the Next Generation

December 5, 2018Kate AronoffThe Intercept

Like its 1930s counterpart, the “Green New Deal” isn’t a specific set of programs so much as an umbrella under which various policies might fit, ranging from technocratic to transformative. The sheer scale of change needed to deal effectively with climate change is massive, as the scientific consensus is making increasingly clear, requiring an economy-wide mobilization of the sort that the United States hasn’t really undertaken since World War II. While the Green New Deal imaginary evokes images of strapping young men pulling up their sleeves to hoist up wind turbines (in the mold of realist Civilian Conservation Corps ads), its actual scope is far broader than the narrow set of activities typically housed under the green jobs umbrella, or even in the original New Deal.

October in the McHarg Center

October in the McHarg Center

October 30, 2018Billy FlemingMcHarg Center Newsletter

This month, we opened registration for Design With Nature Now, received a transformative gift from the Wilks Family Foundation, published our work in CityLab, and welcome hundreds of alumni and friends to Philly for ASLA.

The Dutch Can't Save Us from Rising Seas

The Dutch Can't Save Us from Rising Seas

October 17, 2018Billy FlemingThe Atlantic's CityLab

To put it bluntly, there is nothing remotely comparable about the nature of the risk in the Netherlands and the nature of the risk in the United States.

With Nature, Without Delay

October 11, 2018Jennifer ReutLandscape Architecture Magazine

"People tend to discount the activist legacy of McHarg. He's often framed as a technocrat, but there's a long, consistent thread of advocacy and activism in his work."

Can Civilization Survive What’s Coming?

October 9, 2018Jeff GoodellRolling Stone

It’s not enough that Portland, Oregon, or Berkeley, California, get to zero carbon emissions by 2050. Or the entire state of California, for that matter. Or even the entire United States. The entire world must eliminate (or offset)carbon pollution by 2050.

Environmental Design, Systems Thinking, and Human Agency: McHarg’s Ecological Method and Steinitz and Rogers’s Interdisciplinary Education Experiment

October 1, 2018Moa Karolina CarlssonLandscape Journal

This article discusses two models of environmental simulation that emerged in landscape architecture with the rise of the environmental movement in the United States: Ian McHarg’s (1969) ecological method and Carl Steinitz and Peter Rogers’s (1968) systems analysis model of urbanization and change.

Cape Town Is an Omen

September 11, 2018Vann Newkirk IIThe Atlantic

While each city has a very different set of reasons for its water woes, ranging from pollution to poor infrastructure to poor planning to desertification and drought, they all share a common challenge: Climate change will likely make the task of providing water harder, the populations thirstier, and the people angrier, even as many of the cities grow.

The Perfect Storm: How Climate Change and Wall Street Almost Killed Puerto Rico

September 9, 2018Jeff GoodellRolling Stone

Puerto Rico has not recovered. In fact, it’s arguably as close to collapse as it has ever been. The power is on and the roads are open, but if you look closely, the entire island is held together with duct tape and baling wire. Tens of thousands of people are still living under the blue tarps that were installed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency on houses that had their roofs blown off during the storm. Engineers are still discovering bridges that are in danger of collapsing, and every time it rains, new leaks are found in concrete foundations.

The End of the Architect Profile

April 19, 2018Alexandra LangeCurbed

Something, anything, to keep your reader from the truth: that your subject is an abstraction-spouting workaholic with a huge team of people who have drawn, rendered, detailed, supervised, constructed the work in question. The profile lives to serve the simplest possible narrative of architecture: one man, glorious inspiration, a building.