March 24, 2023 @ 3:30 p.m. MDT
About the Lecture:
As climate-induced shifts make our coastal environments increasingly volatile and unpredictable, establishing new ways of working that move beyond the tried-and-true assumptions that past observations provide accurate examples for future conditions has become necessary. This becomes even more prescient when considering the objectives of designing or engineering with nature as opposed to simply protecting ourselves against it. Experimentation and contextual knowledge are finding new applications where once we relied on established and universal standards of best practice. With a focus on liminal coastal environments of both fresh and salt water, this talk will span a range of recent design work, organized around the subject of landscape research methods and this role of experimentation.
Speaker Bio:
Sean Burkholder is the Andrew Gordon Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design where he is co-founder of the Environmental Modeling Lab (EMLab). He is also co-founder of the research and design practice Proof Projects and a member of the Dredge Research Collaborative. Sean’s work bridges the seemingly incommensurable subjects of collaborative environmental monitoring and modeling, working with ecologists and engineers on large coastal infrastructure projects on one hand, and the exploration of new methods of landscape knowledge creation that both question and supplement positivist science as our primary referent for progress and agency by way of curiosity and temporally-driven experimentation on the other. His new book Five Bay Landscapes: Curious Explorations of the Great Lakes Basin, co-authored with Karen Lutsky, will be published by the University of Pittsburg Press in late 2022, and he is currently working on a new book titled Lakemaker: Surveys, Stories and Speculations of Held Water.
Watch the Lecture Here:
