Landscape Architecture Lectures

Time Magazine (2006) called Kongjian Yu as "A force of nature." Professor Yu received is the founder and Dean of the Graduate School of Landscape Architecture at Peking University, and the founder and President of Turenscape, an internationally awarded firm with more than 400 professionals. He earned his Doctor of Design Degree at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design in 1995. Among numerous international awards, Dr. Yu is a five-time winner of ASLA Honor Awards in the past years for his ecologically and culturally sensitive projects. Part of the title of his lecture for the University of Illinois "The Art of Survival," comes from his memorable definition of landscape architecture.

Julia is the inaugural Director of UPSTATE: a design research and advocacy organization housed within the School of Architecture at Syracuse University. The mission of this center, since its inception in 2005, is to engage innovative design and development practices, addressing critical issues of urban revitalization in the Upstate, New York region. The center initiates, facilitates, and showcases projects that apply innovative, experimental design research to challenges faced by real-world communities.

Mark, a 2008-2009 Fiel Traveling Fellowship winner, will be talking about his visits to a number of U.S. landscapes that were designed as "healing gardens."

The work of contemporary artist-designer Patricia Johanson provides a unique case for addressing the practice of translation between visual and landscape arts. Since the 1960s, when Johanson was an avant-garde painter, her career has intertwined with major movements in American art while also being marked by decisive boundary-crossing among the visual arts, the natural sciences, and landscape design. Looking back on forty years of artistic production, Johanson has called her mature work The Garden of Art. This presentation will offer an overview of Johanson's experimental path and the maturing process that led to her translation from visual into landscape arts.

Katharyn, a 2008-2009 Fiel Traveling Fellowship winner, will be talking about her exploration of urban waterfronts in the United States.

Pierre Belanger is Associate Professor at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. He teaches graduate courses on design and planning in the interrelated fields of landscape, infrastructure and urbanism. Cited by urbanists and thinkers such as AbdouMaliq Simone, Elizabeth K. Meyer and Jennifer Leonard, Belanger's research work is published in planning, design and engineering journals and books including Topos, The Landscape Urbanism Reader, Geoinformatics, Journal of Tunneling and Underground Space Technology, Trash, Food, Canadian Architect and 306090.