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Kathleen L. JohnAlder is an Associate Professor and a registered landscape architect with over twenty years of professional experience. She holds undergraduate degrees from Oberlin College and Rutgers University, an M.S. in Botany from Pennsylvania State University, and an M.E.D. in history and theory from Yale University School of Architecture. As an Associate Partner for Olin Partnership, Kathleen was involved in the landscape designs for the J. P. Getty Center, the U.S. Federal Courthouse in Boston, and the Washington Monument. She also led the firm’s entry for the Orange County Great Park Competition and worked with the World Monument Fund to prepare a landscape master plan for Qianlong’s Garden in Beijing, China.
Kathleen’s research involves the transformative role of ecology and environmentalism in the discourse of mid-twentieth century landscape design. To date this work has concentrated on the process-theories of the landscape architects Ian McHarg and Lawrence Halprin. Kathleen is the author of “The Garden, The Greenhouse and The Picturesque View, which appears in Kevin Roche: Architecture as Environment, “A Field Guide to Form: Lawrence Halprin’s Ecological Engagement with The Sea Ranch,” which appeared in a special edition of Landscape Journal devoted to the work of Lawrence Halprin, and “Processing Natural Time: Lawrence Halprin and the Sea Ranch Ecoscore”, which will appear in Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes. She was recently awarded a Dumbarton Oaks Fellowship for the fall of 2013.
Kathleen also teaches studio design at the graduate and undergraduate level. A Praxis studio she conducted on Hopewell Furnace National Historic Site in the spring of 2012 was a co-finalist for The Parks for The People Student Design Competition, sponsored by The Van Alen Institute and The National Park Service.