“On Mountains” Panel Discussion and Exhibition Opening Reception

Michael Jakob is lead curator of the GSD’s Spring 2019 main exhibition Mountains and the Rise of Landscape. He joins the exhibition co-curators and others  in a conversation about mountains and their complex, fascinating history. The exhibition, How to Model a Mountain, curated by Ed Eigen, and installed in the Frances Loeb Library, will be the backdrop for the discussion.

The noon panel discussion takes place in the Frances Loeb Library (ground floor). In the evening, at 6:30 PM, a reception and opening for the exhibitions will take place in the Druker Design Gallery. Both events are free and open to the public.

Participants

Anita Berrizbeitia MLA ’87 is Professor of Landscape Architecture and Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture. Her research focuses on design theories of modern and contemporary landscape architecture, the productive aspects of landscapes, and Latin American cities and landscapes. She was awarded the 2005/2006 Prince Charitable Trusts Rome Prize Fellowship in Landscape Architecture. A native of Caracas, Venezuela, she studied architecture at the Universidad Simon Bolivar before receiving a BA from Wellesley College and an MLA from the GSD.

Berrizbeitia has taught design theory and studio, most recently at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, where she was Associate Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture. Her studios investigate innovative approaches to the conceptualization of public space, especially on sites where urbanism, globalization, and local cultural conditions intersect. She also leads seminars that focus on significant transformations in landscape discourse over the last three decades. From 1987 to 1993, she practiced with Child Associates, Inc., in Boston, where she collaborated on many award-winning projects.

She is co-author, with Linda Pollak, of Inside/Outside: Between Architecture and Landscape (Rockport, 1999), which won an ASLA Merit Award; author of Roberto Burle Marx in Caracas: Parque del Este, 1956-1961 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), awarded the J.B. Jackson Book Prize in 2007 from the Foundation for Landscape Studies; and editor of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates: Reconstructing Urban Landscapes (Yale University Press, 2009), which received an ASLA Honor Award. Her essays have been published in Daniel Urban Kiley: The Early Gardens (Princeton Architectural Press), Recovering Landscape (Princeton Architectural Press), Roberto Burle Marx: Landscapes Reflected (Princeton Architectural Press), CASE: Downsview Park Toronto (Prestel), Large Parks (Princeton Architectural Press), Retorno al Paisaje (Evren), and Hargreaves Associates: Landscape Alchemy (ORO Publishers), as well as in magazines such as A+U.

Edward A. Eigen is an Associate Professor of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. A historian of the long nineteenth century, in the European and Anglo-American contexts, his research and teaching focus on relationships in and between humanistic and scholarly traditions and the natural sciences and allied practices of knowledge production. With a background in art history, a professional training in design, and a doctorate in the history and theory of architecture from MIT, he is at home with and seeks to productively defamiliarize images, texts, and topographies of intricate description. A proponent of the Montaignian essay tradition, his writings, while ultimately grounded in the uncertain terrain of “landscape,” have ranged from questions of botanical and zoological systematics, the creation and loss of great and not so great museums and libraries, the history of the weather, and acts of plagiarism in the founding documents of architecture theory. All of these studies engage in questions of historical narrative and the species of evidence upon which it depends and/or invents along the way.

Eigen was an assistant professor at the Princeton University School of Architecture, where he was an Old Dominion Faculty Fellow, and the recipient of a university-wide graduate mentoring award, and the David A. Gardner ’69 Magic Grant for his research on architectural machines.  His article on the prestidigitator Robert-Houdin’s invention of the doorbell will appear as “Controlling: Comfort in the Modern Home,” in Architecture and Technics: A Theoretical Field Guide to Practice. At the GSD, Eigen co-organized the colloquium “Claiming Landscape as Architecture,” which appeared as a special issue of Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes, of which he is an Associate Editor. His recent book, On Accident: Episodes in Architecture and Landscape (MIT Press), seeks to reclaim and provide forms of interpretability for unfamiliar incidents and artifacts that fall outside the canon. His current monograph project, Beyond the Rose Garden, examines real and emblematic landscapes and architectures associated with the administrations of Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford, including the “grassy knoll,” the Highway Beautification Act, Watergate, and the Bicentennial Time Capsule.

Michael Jakob teaches History and Theory of Landscape at hepia, Geneva, and aesthetics of design at HEAD, Geneva. He is a visiting professor at Politecnico di Milano and the Accademia di Architettura in Mendrisio. He is, at the same time, Professor of Comparative Literature (Chair) at Grenoble University. Jakob’s teaching and research focus on landscape theory, aesthetics, the history of vertigo, contemporary theories of perception and the poetics of architecture. He is the founder and head of COMPAR(A)ISON, an International Journal of Comparative Literature and the chief editor of “di monte in monte”, a series of books on mountain culture (Edizioni Tarara’, Verbania). He produced several documentary films for TV and has a longstanding experience as a radio journalist. Michael Jakob published recently: 100 Paysages, Infolio, Gollion 2011; asp Architecture du paysage, Infolio, Gollion 2012; Mirei Shigemori e il nuovo linguaggio del giardino giapponese, Tarara’, Verbania 2012; the swiss touch in landscape architecture, Tarara’, Verbania 2013/ Ifengspace, Tianjing 2015; La poétique du banc, Macula, Paris 2014/ Sulla Panchina, Einaudi, Turin 2014/ The Bench in the Garden, Oro Editions, Bay Area 2017; Cette ville qui nous regarde, b2 éditions, Paris 2015/ Dall’alto della città, Lettera 22, Siracusa 2017; Des jardins & des livres, MetisPresses, Geneva 2018

Martino Pedrozzi (Zurich 1971) is currently a design studio visiting professor at the Mendrisio Academy of Architecture, where he founded and has led since 2003, the Summer School program WISH; Workshop on International Social Housing (www.wish.usi.ch). He is a board member of the newly completed “Teatro dell’architettura”, an on-campus building devoted to major exhibitions, inaugurated in 2018 with “Louis Kahn and Venice”. His recent essay “Il Lido di Ascona di Livio Vacchini: una teoria del giunto”, was published by Casagrande, Bellinzona, in 2017.

In 1996, after graduating from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) he worked in the studio of Oscar Niemeyer in Rio de Janeiro. Returning to Switzerland he established his own architectural practice (www.pedrozzi.com) in Mendrisio. His work ranges from complex urban projects at the invitation of both private and public companies such as Bâloise Group or the Swiss Federal Railways, to self-initiated interventions that engage with the rural heritage of the Swiss Alpine Region.

Martinos’s affinity for mountains, in part stems from two years in early childhood spent living in a remote Peruvian village, where he experienced the intense landscapes of the Andes. His activities are internationally recognized through publications, public lectures and awards.

Pablo Pérez-Ramos MLA ’87, DDes ’18 is Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. His research and teaching focus on the relationship between design and ecology. Departing from the prevalence of ecologically-driven design in today’s landscape architecture, his work retraces the genealogy of systems and process-based ideas in the theory of ecology, and investigates their mediation with design methods that privilege the legibility and the specificity of form.

A licensed architect from the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid ETSAM, Pérez-Ramos also holds a Master of Advanced Studies from the same school, and a Master in Landscape Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. His work has been funded through grants and fellowships from the Fundación La Caixa, the Fundación Caja Madrid, the Harvard GSD, the Penny White Fund, and the Harvard RCC.

Pérez-Ramos has been visiting assistant professor and the Urban Landscape Program coordinator in the Northeastern University School of Architecture. He has been a member of the editorial board of the New Geographies journal from 2013 to 2018, and co-editor-in-chief of New Geographies 08: Island (Harvard GSD, 2016). His writing has also been published in A Line in the Andes (Harvard GSD, 2012), MONU (2014), Urban Landscape: Critical Concepts in Built Environment (Routledge, 2015) and Architecture is All Over (Columbia University Press, 2017).

His research and design work have been recognized in international competitions of architecture and urbanism. He is a landscape consultant and has recently served as landscape planning coordinator for the 2025 Masterplan for the Metropolitan District of Quito.

We regret that Jeffrey Schnapp will no longer be able to participate in the conversation.

Anyone requiring accessibility accommodations should contact the Public Programs Office at (617) 496-2414 or [email protected].

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