Laurie Olin, founding partner of the landscape architecture and urban design firm OLIN, delivers this year's Whittemore Lecture on Tuesday, March 26, at 5 p.m. in Rackham Amphitheater.
This year's Whittemore Lecture in Landscape Architecture featured a panel discussion on the topic "Landmark Women in Landscape Architecture." The Institute for Research on Women and Gender co-sponsore the lecture with SNRE.
Harlow O. Whittemore (1889-1986) was a nationally recognized leader in landscape architecture and community planning, and served as professor and chairman of the Department of Landscape Architecture and City Planning at the University of Michigan. He received his master's degree in Landscape Design from the University of Michigan in 1914 and was invited to join the landscape architecture faculty the very same year, serving until his retirement in 1958. In addition to his prominent role at U-M, Whittemore was instrumental in developing the concept for the Huron-Clinton Metropark Authority.
Sometimes messier is better. Walter Hood's ideal landscape is messy. Its essence comes from the land and the people who occupy it. He wants it to be the kind of place where people feel free: free to loiter, sleep, walk the dog or just be. Unconventional may be a good term to describe Hood, professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley. As the Harlow O. Whittemore guest lecturer at the University of Michigan School of Natural Resources and Environment, Hood pointed out that he doesn't have an office, but does maintain a studio. He doesn't tag his work with conventional labels, but uses a litany of descriptors to identify his projects.
Bomb craters, vacant lots, refugee camps, trenches, wastelands, dumps, cracks in the sidewalk: these are the unlikely locales of what landscape architect Kenneth Helphand calls "defiant gardens."
"They are gardens created in extreme environmental, social, political, cultural or economic conditions," he told an audience filling the Michigan Theater screening room February 16. "They are acts of adaptation to their challenging circumstances, but they can also be viewed as affirmations of human resilience."