When Catherine Seavitt joined the faculty of the Department of Landscape Architecture at the Weitzman School of Design in 2023—becoming the seventh person to serve as its chair—she knew it was approaching an important milestone. Although most people associate landscape architecture at Penn with Ian McHarg, the pioneering ecologist and public intellectual who led the program to international prominence in the mid-20th century, its origins go back decades earlier.
The first landscape architecture students arrived in 1924, with the appointment of Robert Wheelwright as the chair of the newly established Department of Landscape Architecture. Wheelwright was a founding member of the American Society of Landscape Architects, co-founder and editor of the journal Landscape Architecture, and a prominent landscape architect in New York and Philadelphia.
So Seavitt set about planning a birthday party. On Sept. 26 and 27, the Weitzman School will host Landscape Futures: Centennial of the Department of Landscape Architecture, a two-day symposium of lectures, panel discussions, and receptions. The aim is to celebrate the department’s unique ecological foundations, its evolving curriculum, and its ongoing global influence on landscape architectural practice and education, while addressing future disciplinary currents.
“Our department is recognized as a place of collaborative conversation,” Seavitt says. “Maybe that has to do with the way we landed within a strong program in the fine arts back in 1924. There have been novel, transdisciplinary conversations happening from the very beginning.”
The centennial symposium will include three panels moderated by Weitzman faculty, organized around the themes of The Household of Nature, The Astronaut, and The Naturalist. All three themes call back to McHargian ideas. McHarg hosted a television show about ecology called “The House We Live In,” for example, and used the figures of the astronaut and the naturalist as metaphors about humans’ relationship to the earth. But the symposium is also designed to celebrate the work of successive faculty who have challenged and repositioned those ideas, and reasserted the dynamism of landscapes and people’s work within them.
“Today, we should really question the very idea of layer separation. Is it possible to disentangle environmental and social layers that are intertwined and importantly, entangled in complex ways?” Seavitt says. “What do you lose when you separate things? What are you not seeing because you might be at too high an altitude? We need to get back into the weeds, literally, and reconsider our social and formal relations with both human and more-than-human beings.”
Read more at Weitzman News.
