31st Landscape Architecture Lecture Series to focus on resilience and remediation, starts Oct. 12
“In this lecture series, our guest speakers will discuss
and present projects illustrating how new approaches to complex issues in urban
and residential settings can remediate disturbed and brown field sites and lead
to greater resiliency,” said Professor Emeritus William Green, founder and
organizer of the series.
Lectures will be held Thursdays at 7 p.m. in Room 105 of
the Beaupre Center for Chemical and Forensic Sciences. The series is free and
open to the public.
The series opens Oct. 12 with New
York City-based architect and urban designer Gabriel Vergara, who will speak on
“Spatial Practice: Working with/in the Social and Climate Crisis.”
In his work, Vergara uses a multidisciplinary approach, bringing alternative knowledge to the field of architecture and urban design. Vergara, a graduate of the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, is an urban designer with Asia Initiatives, where he leads participatory design in New York and coordinates community-based projects in Chile.
On Nov. 16, Kate Kennen,
founder of Offshoots Inc., a Boston-based landscape and horticultural
installation practice, will focus on “Scaling up! Landscapes of Productive
Planting Exploration.”
Kennen, a professor at Northeastern University and
co-author of “PHYTO: Principles and Resources for Site Remediation and Landscape
Design,” will talk about her work at Offshoots to alleviate and minimize use of
fertilizer, water and time, and create productive landscapes that use the power
of plants to mitigate pollution. She will also discuss her work from
residential to infrastructural, in which small projects have been used as
testing grounds to scale up performative planting concepts that mitigate
climate change and urban pollution.
On Nov. 30, the series
closes the semester with alumni Alexis Stanhope, landscape designer with
Hollander Design in New York City, and Josh Bourgery, an associate with Matthew
Cunningham Landscape Design, a Boston firm with offices in Maine and Stoneham,
Massachusetts . They will discuss “Redefining the Boundaries of Residential
Design.”
Stanhope, who graduated from URI with a degree in
landscape architecture in 2019, specializes in coastal estate projects in the
Hamptons, managing all phases of the project from initial design sketches to
onsite meetings with contractors. Bourgery, who joined Cunningham Landscape Design
in 2016 after graduating from URI, manages residential landscape projects in
New Hampshire, Boston and Rhode Island, from small urban courtyards to
multi-acre estates.
The lecture series is co-sponsored by the Rhode Island
Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects, the Rhode Island ASLA
and the Faella, Gaetano and Pasqualina Memorial Endowment.
