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Designing with Intentionality
The Charles F. Gillette Forum on Landscape Design

In this year’s Gillette Forum, we gather to discuss our growing and altered understanding of how to shape the land to honor natural processes, to create meaningful places that are healthy for humans and the natural world.  We act with intentionality to embrace and explore solutions to contemporary and social issues.

Landscape architects and designers now see that actions once considered separate and apart from natural processes are anything but. The contemporary act of design gathers the multiple threads of diversity and applies process and creativity to make meaningful places.

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$85 per person includes continental breakfast and lunch.

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Date:
Friday, November 2, 2018
Time:
9:30 am - 3:30 pm
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Event Details

Charles F. gillette ForumSpeakers address intentionality through three lenses:

Julie Bargmann, Professor and Dean, University of Virginia School of Landscape Architecture,
Principal, D.I.R.T Studio

Working Landscape

Landscapes of labor – past and present – bestow extraordinary circumstances of complexity and beauty.  With respect for site histories of working landscapes, D.I.R.T. studio has carefully offered regenerative layers that engage the cyclical nature of urban and industrial sites and the systems to which they belong. The socioecological health of degraded places and their marginalized communities is at stake. D.I.R.T. studio has deployed physical design as one approach, operational design strategies as another. The imperative, always: the landscape must work.

Timothy Beatley, Teresa Heinz Professor of Sustainable Communities, in the Department of Urban and Environmental Planning, School of Architecture at the University of Virginia, University of Virginia

The Nature of Cities: Toward a Biophilic Urbanism

As the planet continues to rapidly urbanize there is a growing sense that a new model is needed: one that overcomes the physical (and mental) disconnect between nature and cities. Beatley believes that contact with nature is not something optional but it absolutely essential for a happy, healthy and meaningful life. Beatley will review the many ways in which cities are already profoundly natureful and biodiverse and he will describe the emerging concept of Biophilic Urbanism as alternative global vision for how cities might grow and develop. He will discuss the newly formed global Biophilic Cities Network and will provide examples of innovative design and planning in cities in the Network. While there are significant obstacles to be overcome, the vision of Biophilic Cities is a hopeful and optimistic one that at once understands the need for daily contact with the natural world and the need to to take steps through urban design and planning to ensure that cities are and will be a positive force for global conservation.

Alexander Felson, Associate Professor, Yale University School of Landscape Architecture

Working in the Middle Ground between Ecological Science and Landscape Architecture

Dr. Felson explores his work to integrate applied ecology with landscape architecture and urban design focusing on climate adaptation, green infrastructure and directing the NYC Reforestation Plan informing the MillionTreesNYC and leveraged a publicly funded design project to build the country’s largest constructed urban forestry experiment. He also examines the bioretention gardens he built, designed as experiments for research as well as public gardens for an underserved neighborhood in Bridgeport CT which now serves as a testbed for public involvement and adaptive management.

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5 contact hours, HSW, LACES (pending), VSLD, CVNLA, CBLP