Architect and urbanist Charles Waldheim, juror of the 2019 Research Prize, discussed his work as it relates to the topic of the Research Prize: “Shrinking our Agricultural Footprint.”
The lecture was organized in collaboration with the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and the Chicago Architecture Biennial.
Charles Waldheim’s talk opened with a brief reconsideration of Ludwig Hilberseimer’s vision of Chicago as a distributed agrarian urban field and located that project in a longer history of progressive urban projects that addresses societal and environmental reform. This brief prehistory set the context for the topic of the 2019 SOM Foundation Research Prize and referenced a small number of contemporary practices who are also engaging with the relationship between agricultural production, culinary culture, and urbanization. The main body of the talk focused on Waldheim’s current research through the GSD Office for Urbanization including projects that explicitly focus on the agrarian context for new urban propositions.
Ludwig Hilberseimer, planner, with Alfred Caldwell, delineator, “The City in the Landscape,” 1942. Courtesy Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, Gift of Alfred Caldwell.
Charles Waldheim is a North American architect and urbanist. He advises public and private clients on questions of contemporary urbanism and collaborates with multidisciplinary teams on urban projects internationally. Waldheim’s research and practice examine 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, Waldheim is author of Landscape as Urbanism: A General Theory and editor of The Landscape Urbanism Reader. Waldheim developed the theory of landscape urbanism in response to the industrial economy, emergent ecology, and particular histories of the American city. On this topic, he curates the Future of the American City platform. Waldheim is John E. Irving Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design where he directs the School’s Office for Urbanization. He also serves as the Ruettgers Curator of Landscape at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Waldheim is recipient of the Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome; the Visiting Scholar Research Fellowship from the Canadian Centre for Architecture; the Cullinan Chair at Rice University; and the Sanders Fellowship at the University of Michigan. He has been visiting scholar at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London and the Bauhaus in Dessau.
