Designing opportunities, not solutions, in Northeast Arizona
In a collaboration with the Hopi of Arizona, Weitzman School of Design students learn to listen to the land and channel the community’s aspirations.
2 min. read
The Hopi have continuously inhabited northeastern Arizona for nearly 1,000 years, making and remaking the landscape of the 1.5 million-acre tribal reservation there. Last semester, a group of Weitzman School of Design graduate students studying landscape architecture traveled to the Hopi First Mesa Consolidated Villages in Northeast Arizona to learn about their landscape practices, and to help illustrate the community’s visions for restoration of the land.
Max Taylor, a Hopi ethnobotanist, leads students on a site visit at the Hopi First Mesa Consolidated Villages in the fall of 2025.
(Image: Courtesy of Weitzman News)
The studio was led by Ellen Neises, a landscape architect and associate professor of practice who has worked with Indigenous groups around the U.S. for years. More than a decade ago Neises began collaborating with Fred Phillips, a landscape architect who has carried out a series of restoration projects with tribal communities in Arizona, Colorado, Texas, and northern New Mexico since the late 1990s. Phillips has periodically lectured to Neises’s students at Penn. Last year, he and Neises developed a studio course at Weitzman to advance a multiphase public space and ecological revitalization project Phillips’s firm is working on with the Hopi.
Guided by the community’s aspirations, the work includes an ambitious set of improvements to the Pongsikya, also known as Keams Canyon, and the villages of First Mesa that includes developing a park and trails, restored waterways and vegetation, and economic and cultural development. That scope is typical of Phillips’s practice, which has included multiphase restoration projects in the southwest driven by Indigenous communities’ vision for their land. Phillips began working with tribal communities as a young landscape architecture student at Purdue University, and has spent his career helping to bring landscape design, planning, and funding to native-led projects.
“I felt that native wisdom and philosophy should be a guiding light for landscape architecture,” Phillips says. “It’s really about listening to the land, seeing what’s there and understanding what was there, and having that guide your practice.”
Students began the semester researching Hopi history and culture, analyzing geological and climatic conditions, and developing design ideas tied to Hopi material objects, from baskets to textiles and tools. They visited the First Mesa—the easternmost of three mesas that mark the area—in October and learned directly from residents, who showed them spaces of cultural importance and areas of degradation.
This story is by Jared Brey. Read more at Weitzman News.
Novel plant-based approach to a better, cheaper GLP-1 delivery system
Research led by Penn Dental’s Henry Daniell investigates the use of a lettuce-based, plant-encapsulated delivery platform as a new oral delivery of two GLP-1 drugs previously approved by the FDA in injectable form.
No brain, no gain: Neuronal activity enhances benefits of exercise
Research led by Penn neuroscientist J. Nicholas Betley and collaborators finds that hypothalamic neurons are essential for translating physical exertion into endurance, potentially opening the door to exercise-mimicking therapies.
In honor of Valentine's Day, and as a way of fostering community in her Shakespeare in Love course, Becky Friedman took her students to the University Club for lunch one class period. They talked about the movie "Shakespeare in Love," as part of a broader conversation on how Shakespeare's works are adapted.
In Becky Friedman’s English course Shakespeare in Love, undergraduate students analyze language, genre, and adaptation in the Bard’s plays through the lens of love.
Beating the heat: Designing cooling for bodies in motion
Dorit Aviv, director of Weitzman’s Thermal Architecture Lab, studies how humans, technology, and design intersect, paving the way for the development of novel approaches to cooling people efficiently.
