International Lecture Series with Charles Waldheim: Ecologies, Plural and Projective

This open lecture at KADK is taught by Charles Waldheim - architect, urbanist and professor at Harvard University.  

The emerging discourse of “ecological urbanism’” has been proposed to more precisely describe the aspirations of an urban practice informed by environmental issues and imbued with the sensibilities associated with landscape. This most recent adjectival modifier of urbanism reveals the need for re-qualifying urban design as it attempts to describe the environmental, economic, and social conditions of the contemporary city.

The formulation “projective ecologies” has recently been proposed as an extension and elaboration of the ecological urbanism initiative. Following from and building upon the discourse of ecological urbanism, this development raises timely questions regarding the status of ecology as an adjectival modifier to urbanism. Ecology has emerged as among the most important epistemological frameworks of our age. This assertion is based on the fact that ecology has transcended its origins as a natural science to encompass a range of meanings across the natural and social sciences, history and the humanities, design and the arts. From a proto-disciplinary branch of biology in the nineteenth century, ecology has developed into a modern science in the twentieth century, and increasingly toward a multidisciplinary intellectual framework in the first decades of the twenty-first century.

About Charles Waldheim

Charles Waldheim is a North American architect, urbanist, and educator. Waldheim’s research examines the relations between landscape, ecology, and contemporary urbanism. He coined the term ‘landscape urbanism’ to describe the emergent discourse and practices of landscape in relation to design culture and contemporary urbanization.

On these topics, he is author of Landscape as Urbanism: A General Theory and editor of The Landscape Urbanism Reader. Waldheim is John E. Irving Professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design where he directs the School’s Office for Urbanization. He is recipient of the Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome; the Visiting Scholar Research Fellowship at the Study Centre of the Canadian Centre for Architecture; the Cullinan Chair at Rice University; and the Sanders Fellowship at the University of Michigan.