Church Lecture Series: Waldheim

Waldheim Discusses Landscape Architecture as Landscape Urbanism

The College of Architecture and Design hosts Charles Waldheim, Harvard University, on April 18, 5:30 p.m.  Waldheim will lecture in the Art + Architecture Building’s McCarty Auditorium, 1715 Volunteer Boulevard.  The lecture is free and open to the public.

Waldheim is director of the Office for Urbanism and the John E. Irving Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.  His lecture, Landscape as Urbanism, proposes a general theory for thinking of the city through the medium of landscape. The lecture surveys the emergence of various professions responsible for the shape of the city across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries including landscape architecture, urban planning and urban design.  It locates the origins of landscape urbanist discourse in the intersection of progressive architectural culture and populist environmentalism in the context of neoliberal economies. In this context, landscape practices accelerated ecological thinking across the urban arts, and landscape urbanism emerged to occupy a void created by urban planning’s shift away from design culture in favor of social science, as urban design committed to neo-traditional models of town planning.

A North American architect and urbanist, Waldheim coined the term “landscape urbanism” to describe the emergent discourse and practices of landscape in relation to design culture and contemporary urbanization.  He is the author of Landscape as Urbanism: A General Theory and editor of The Landscape Urbanism Reader.  His research examines the relationship among landscape, ecology and contemporary urbanism.

Waldheim serves as the Ruettgers Curator of Landscape at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.  He is the recipient of the Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome; the Visiting Scholar Research Fellowship at the Study Centre of the Canadian Centre for Architecture; the Cullinan Chair at Rice University; and the Sanders Fellowship at the University of Michigan.

Waldheim’s lecture is part of the College of Architecture and Design’s Robert B. Church Lecture Series.  It offers continuing education credits and will be streamed live.