On Sept. 26 and 27, the Weitzman School will host Landscape Futures: Centennial of the Department of Landscape Architecture, a two-day symposium to celebrate the department’s unique ecological foundations, its evolving curriculum, and its ongoing global influence on landscape architectural practice and education.
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.
Catherine Seavitt (seated, glasses) at a Spring 2024 studio review. “Our department is recognized as a place of collaborative conversation,” says Seavitt, who is also co-executive director of The Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism & Ecology.
(Image: Courtesy of Weitzman News)
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.”
Penn engineers and collaborators have developed a transparent, micro-engineered device that houses a living, vascularized model of human lung cancer—a “tumor on a chip”—and show that the diabetes drug vildagliptin helps more CAR T cells break through the tumor’s defenses and attack it effectively.
Tumor-on-a-chip offers insight into cancer-fighting cells in immunotherapy
Penn engineers and collaborators have built a living tumor on a chip to expose how cancers block immune attacks, and how one existing drug could make immunotherapy like CAR T more effective against solid tumors.
Professor of city and regional planning Erick Guerra recently published a book exploring the economic and societal impacts of American highways. He explains some of the pitfalls associated with an ever-expansive highway system, arguing that spending more on highways might not be the solution to the country’s transportation issues.
Penn urban planner Erick Guerra’s new book, “Overbuilt,” argues that additional spending on building more highways might not be the solution to the country’s transportation issues. In a Q&A, Guerra shares his insights.
Xin Sun prepares samples collected from the Eastern Tropical North Pacific aboard a research vessel. By adding stable isotope tracers to these vials, Sun and her team can track how different microbial groups convert nitrogen compounds into nitrous oxide, revealing how subtle shifts in oxygen and organic matter change the ocean’s chemistry.
Can tiny ocean organisms offer the key to better climate modeling?
In the shadowy layers of the Pacific, microbes decide how much nitrous oxide—a potent greenhouse gas—rises skyward. New research from Penn’s Xin Sun offers an improved understanding of microbial ecology and geochemistry—key to forecasting global emissions in response to natural and man-made climate change.
Two X-ray plates from Arthur Goodspeed, believed to have created the world’s first X-ray image, were donated by his family to Penn’s University Archives.
