Common Lecture

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In this lecture, Denise Mattes, the Brooklyn Design Director of NYC Parks Capital Projects, will discuss her journey through the last 30+ years. She will demonstrate on how this profession has so many avenues to explore, underline the importance of volunteering, and ultimately finding the work one can enjoy.  She will also talk about her career at NYC Parks, her destination. However: “It’s not the destination, it’s the journey.”  

Denise Mattes will receive the RULA Outstanding Alumni Award 2024. 

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The lecture will use critical spatial discourses to unpack the colonial stories in Landscape Architecture and describe equity-based alternatives. Afrofuturism can be used as a framework to daylight and dismantle colonial narratives based in extractive and oppressive systems with methodologies for life-stewarding practices. It is rooted in ancient wisdom from Africa and around the world and operates at the “intersection of imagination, technology, the future and liberation” to imagine social change (Womack, 2013). As we envision equitable and sustainable futures, it’s important to design Landscape practices based in truth-telling, justice, reciprocity and care. 

Bio

Divine Ndemeye (she/her) is a landscape designer with ancestral roots from Burundi. She is a landscape designer at space2place. She holds a Masters in Landscape Architecture from UBC School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (SALA) since 2020, and a background in Political Science and Human Geography from the University of Alberta. She was the recipient of the 2020 Olmsted Scholar Award; the premier leadership recognition program for Landscape Architecture students in the U.S and Canada. Divine is committed to the advancement of social and environmental justice through place-based designs. She is continuously engaging in critical discourses and explorations of decolonized design paradigms which centre marginalized communities. She is the host of the Design unmuted podcast. In her free time, she enjoys long walks at the beach, cocktails and travelling. 

She is Founder + Co-Director BIDC • Black + Indigenous Design Collective. Their mission is building capacity and celebrating the advancement of Black and Indigenous voices and ingenuity in the spatial design fields, and public art through place-making. As a social enterprise, their goal is to advocate for the visibility, well-being, and interests of  Black and Indigenous peoples through spatial interventions, scholarship, community engagement, and decolonizing public spaces through art & design. 

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“The Einstellung effect occurs when a person is presented with a problem or situation that is similar to problems they have worked through in the past. If the solution (or appropriate behavior) to the problem/situation has been the same in each past experience, the person will likely provide that same response, without giving the problem too much thought, even though a more appropriate response might be available.”  The “expertise” we call on can be a barrier to thinking creatively about design and research problems. It is important to find necessary distance from old patterns and methods for researching and designing.  

In this talk Anita Bakshi reflects on what she learned about her perennial intellectual preoccupations – the themes that appear time and time again in different projects – during a research leave last year.  With time to read along the edges of different interests, she was able to reexamine these themes: the hidden histories of places, conflict, intergenerational memory, the development of architectural taste, and the relationship of beauty to social life.  Using excerpts from video projects, memoire, and academic research she will describe how these have impacted her two current collaborative book projects: Our Land, Our Stories, and Collaborations in Architecture and Sociology.  

Bio 

Anita Bakshi teaches in the Department of Landscape Architecture at Rutgers University.  Following several years in architectural practice, she received her PhD in the history and theory of architecture from Cambridge University with the Conflict in Cities research program.  Her research focuses on contested landscapes and histories, environmental justice, and the relationship between architecture and sociology.  She edited the book Our Land, Our Stories: Excavating Subterranean Histories of Ringwood Mines and the Ramapough Lunaape Nation (2022), in partnership with the Ramapough Lunaape Turtle Clan.  She is the author of Topographies of Memories: A New Poetics of Commemoration (2017), and co-author of Collaborations in Architecture and Sociology (2024) with Zaire Dinzey-Flores.    

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Based on the concern and reflection on the topic of “walking”, this lecture will first explain the relationship between walking and critical cognition through three cultural trends in the middle and upper 20th century that are closely related to “walking” and “walking people”. Then, the process of forming critical cognition through the activity of walking is analyzed as “experience-reflection-reconstruction”. Therefore, this lecture will describe and analyze the various academic discussions, social actions and design practices on “walking” in the field of landscape architecture in the past 60 to 70 years from two levels: “walking as a method of landscape cognition” and “walking as a method of landscape design”, identifying how “walking” has helped to develop a critical cognition and inspired design thinking which has been translated into concrete landscapes that are used by people.

Bio

BIAN Simin is an assistant professor, master tutor and the director of international cooperative education program at School of Landscape Architecture, Beijing Forestry University. She got her Ph.D. degree from Tsinghua University. Her research interests include practice and theory of Landscape Architecture, public space and strollology, practice and methodology of urban regeneration. BIAN is also a youth member of Territorial Landscape Committee of the Chinese Society of Landscape Architecture as well as contributing editor of Chinese Landscape Architecture and Landscape Architecture.

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How can a revived love for plants and a deep understanding of form-giving to our environment lead us out of the many crises we are currently facing? At its best, landscape architecture merges ecology and design to create landscapes that work with the site, not against it. In this lecture, Anette Freytag gives an insight into her research and travels during her sabbatical. She investigated how this profession can benefit from a deep understanding of the history of designing with nature and a new care for the plants involved. Anette argues that two concepts – Biophilia and Topology – can help society to better deal with our current environmental crisis and improve well-being for all. She will show recent research and preservation work as well as her community engaged spatial justice projects, where she works with arts integration.

Bio

Anette Freytag is a Professor of the History and Theory of Landscape Architecture at Rutgers University. Her research focuses on designed landscapes from the 19th century to the contemporary practice with a particular focus on topology, phenomenology, and walking. Anette Freytag’s research has been supported by the Rutgers Research Council, the Volkswagen Foundation, the Lucius and Annemarie Burckhardt Foundation, the Christoph Merian Foundation and various other associations and private donors.
Her books have been honored with the J. B. Jackson Book Prize, the European Garden Book Award, the DAM Architectural Book Award, and many more. Before joining Rutgers University, Anette has taught at ETH Zurich, the University of Basel, the University of Innsbruck, and KU Leuven. She was a visiting scholar at the Central Institute for Art History in Munich, the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, and the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University.  In 2019, she co-founded the Arts Integration Research Collaborative (AIR), which prioritizes creative placemaking to foster spatial justice through projects that seek safe access to nature for all. 

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Date of lecture: February 28, 2024

Abstract

As our urban areas get denser, how can we make transformative changes that recapture degraded or abandoned industrial land, convert roadways to pedestrian spaces, embed social and environmental justice into communities, prepare for future impacts of climate change, and make our environment more beautiful? By becoming a landscape architect!Examples of these transformations will be highlighted and inspire the next generation of our optimistic profession.

Bio

Signe Nielsen has been practicing as a landscape architect and urban designer in New York since 1978. Her body of work has renewed the environmental integrity and transformed the quality of spaces for those who live, work and play in the urban realm.  Ms. Nielsen believes in using design as a vehicle for advocacy to promote discourse on social equity and community resilience and has served on multiple panels to effect positive change.  A Fellow of the ASLA, she is the recipient of over 100 national and local design awards for public open space projects and is a Professor of Urban Design and Landscape Architecture at Pratt Institute. Born in Paris, Ms. Nielsen holds degrees in Urban Planning from Smith College; in Landscape Architecture from City College of New York; and in Construction Management from Pratt Institute.

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Margaret O. Cekada Memorial Lecture
When: 3/27 at 6:00 PM
Where: Kathleen Ludwig Global Village Center, 9 Suydam Street
Parking: Please register your vehicle.

Denice Frohman, Award-winning poet and performer

Poetry of Resistance

For The Margaret O. Cekada Memorial Lecture 2024, the Department of Landscape Architecture partners with the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice and the Douglass Residential College to bring the renown poet Denice Frohman to the Cook/Douglass Campus.  Denice Frohman will perform “Poetry of Resistance.” Her poetry explores language, lineage, queerness, and the colonial relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico. In her first multimedia installation called “Our Terms Have Changed,” Frohman explored food and land sovereignty in Puerto Rico as part of a new exhibition called Climate Futurism, which premiered Fall 2023 at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, NY. The work was inspired by her own maternal family’s history as coffee farmers in Adjuntas, Puerto Rico on land that was eventually sold and turned into a luxury Airbnb rental. 

Bio

Denice Frohman is a poet and performer from New York City.  
A Pew Fellow and Baldwin-Emerson Fellow, she’s received support from CantoMundo, Headlands Center for the Arts, the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures, and the National Endowment for the Arts. 

Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The BreakBeat Poets: LatiNext, Nepantla: An Anthology for Queer Poets of Color, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. A former Women of the World Poetry Slam Champion, she’s featured on hundreds of stages from The Apollo to The White House. Recently, she debuted her one-woman show, Esto No Tiene Nombre, centering the oral histories of Latina lesbian elders. She lives in Philadelphia. 

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Exploring Cultural Landscapes around Budapest, Vienna, and the Ruhr Region.

Landscapes are shaped by people; local cultural narratives have an impact on how we see the spaces around us. At the same time, enjoying landscapes is an individual aesthetic experience. I will share my impressions from four months traveling across Europe, using the bicycle for lengthy excursion through the metropolitan regions of Vienna/Austria, Budapest /Hungary, and the Ruhr Region in Germany. Further, I spoke to educators, planning and design professionals, and to members of public administration. Those interview partners explained planning and policy backgrounds, helping me to place my observations into the context of suburban development. The focus of the presentation will be on underlying cultural narratives that shape planning and design approaches to cultural landscapes within the suburban context.

Bio

Dr. Wolfram Höfer is a Professor at the Rutgers of Department of Landscape Architecture and serves as Director of the Rutgers Center for Urban Environmental Sustainability (CUES). Dr. Höfer developed numerous community outreach projects in the field of adaptive re-use of brownfields, urban resiliency, and infrastructure. His current research explores underlying cultural narratives that shape planning and design approaches to cultural landscapes within the suburban context. With climate change, that discussion gains more relevance because open space must meet the competing demands of producing renewable energy, providing food, recreation, and the need for housing.

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Date of lecture: January 24, 2024

Abstract

In 1518, a severe smallpox epidemic swept the Caribbean and American coasts. Subsequently, in the 1520s, enslaved Africans, predominantly Senegambians, waged the first slave revolt in the Americas. Drawing on early modern European (predominantly Portuguese) chronicles about West Africans’ holistic community healing strategies, this paper argues that revolt and marronage were geopolitical, ecological, social, material, and spiritual responses to the smallpox epidemic and other community health threats that Iberian colonialism posed in the sixteenth-century Caribbean. Africanists have long observed that health crises were pretexts for political and social transformation. West and West Central Africans associated epidemic diseases, especially smallpox epidemics, with geopolitical upheavals and transformations. Deities and sacred forces who controlled geopolitical claims and governed community ecologies, notably forests and groves, were also capable of inflicting or relieving smallpox and other contagious flesh disorders in many African cosmologies. Africanists have also observed the centrality of healers and healing guilds in early modern and pre-colonial African geopolitics and sovereignty claims. This paper reappraises early modern European chronicles for evidence of West and West Central African community health management strategies. I argue that Africans migrated these praxes to the Caribbean. They are evident in the sixteenth-century slave revolts and burgeoning maroon societies. This paper resituates revolt and marronage as public healing and community health strategies that countered the health consequences of European slavery and colonialism. Furthermore, this work expands our concept of the Black radical tradition to account for the role of healers and community health in the process of geopolitical claims-making.

Short Bio

Dr. Elise A. Mitchell is an American Council of Learned Societies Fellow and a Presidential Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of History at Princeton University. She has published her research in The William and Mary Quarterly, The Journal of the Early Republic, Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, and various edited volumes. Her essays have appeared in Black Perspectives, The Funambulist, Slate, and The Atlantic. She is working on a book manuscript, titled Morbid Geographies: Enslavement, Epidemics, and Embodiment in the Early Modern Atlantic World, about how enslaved Africans contended with smallpox epidemics between roughly 1500 and 1800. 

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Date of lecture: February 21, 2024

Abstract

The goals of historic preservation are often at odds with efforts to protect properties from climate change. While preservation encourages maintaining a property’s historic appearance, climate change adaptation often requires change, sometimes radical change, to maintain the safety of a building and its occupants.

As the impacts of flooding and intense storms are increasing in prevalence, property owners and communities are trying to balance their desire to increase resiliency in their communities, while maintaining their historic character and sense of place. Property owners seek options to improve resilience in response to parcel vulnerability.  At a community level, municipalities are developing policies, programs, and requirements to address vulnerability on a larger scale, often without considering the impacts on historic resources.  To specifically address the impacts of severe storms on the state’s historic resources, Florida’s Division of Historical Resources, the SHPO, sought to prepare three guidance documents to address the impacts of severe storms.

Going beyond a regulatory review, the guidance relied heavily on information gained through site visits in in-person interviews with eighteen small to mid-sized communities across the state. The site visits provided a first-hand opportunity to document prior storm damage, recovery efforts, and vulnerability as well as the implementation of community-wide and property specific resiliency measures. The information gained during the site visits was compiled to serve as a reference for similar communities. The resulting guidance documents provide a wholistic approach for three separate audiences: property owners, municipalities, and state agencies. They described flood and wind mitigation vulnerability and resiliency measures for historic buildings and archaeological sites, and include an analysis of severe storms on tourism, a key state industry.

The presentation will review the challenges of addressing flood and wind vulnerability across a wide geographic area. It will include a breakdown of the roles, responsibilities, and regulatory requirements of the owner, federal, state, and local governments when addressing mitigation of historic properties.

BIO

Dominique M. Hawkins,
FAIA, NCARB, LEED AP
Managing Principal, Preservation Design Partnership

In 1995, Dominique established PDP as a planning and design practice focusing exclusively on offering high-quality professional services for clients with nationally significant historic sites and buildings.  Her work is at the forefront of addressing change at historic buildings and settings whether through design, the regulatory process, or the impacts of climate change and flooding at historic properties.  From small projects to multi-million-dollar undertakings, Dominique’s work has maintained the highest standards of planning, design, and preservation, resulting in long-lasting relationships, some of which span over a decade of continuous involvement and service.  Her work has been recognized with several awards.