48 Quincy Street
Cambridge, MA
United States
Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD) is pleased to announce three open rank faculty positions within the Department of Landscape Architecture—Assistant or Associate Professor in Landscape Architecture (Environmental History); Professor, Associate Professor, or Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture (Materials and Design); and Professor, Associate Professor, or Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture (Territorial Scale).
The Department of Landscape Architecture is home to the oldest and most distinguished academic program in landscape architecture in the world. Since its founding in 1900, it has played a singular role in the development of landscape architecture as a profession, an academic discipline, and a medium of design that engages urbanism, environmentalism, and culture. Its mission is to advance research and innovative design practices in the natural and built environments, as they intersect with processes of urbanization and the present realities of a changing climate.
Harvard GSD is one of the 12 degree-granting schools that make up Harvard University. The School’s mission is to “educate leaders in design, research, and scholarship to make a resilient, just, and beautiful world.” Harvard GSD is comprised of three academic departments (Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning & Design). Alongside the degree programs offered by those departments, the GSD also offers other degree programs in related fields.
Assistant/Associate Professor in Landscape Architecture (Environmental History)
A junior faculty position is available for highly qualified individuals to offer graduate-level instruction in environmental history. Housed in the Department of Landscape Architecture, this is planned as a full-time tenure track position. Candidates should be researchers and effective teachers who have demonstrated an innovative approach to objects, concepts, and protagonists (human and non-human) of mutual interest and concern to environmental history and the history of the “natural” and built landscape. No region or time period has been specified, leaving the field open to the ancient triad of airs, waters, and places (and their respective inhabitants). In their scholarship, candidates are expected to define the interpretive value of environmental history with respect to past and future possibilities of landscape architecture, notably including but not limited to its status as a design discipline.
Teaching responsibilities include a comprehensive course on the history of the environment, considered as an evolving concept and a lived condition, in relation to built sites and monuments in the landscape. The successful candidate will also offer research-based seminars in their area of specialization to students in the professional, PhD, and other degree tracts.
Teaching responsibilities also involve engagement in the Department of Landscape Architecture’s core curriculum, including “Climate by Design,” which explores responses to the climate crisis including adaptation and mitigation. The candidate is also expected to engage fully and creatively with the school’s design curriculum, including as a guest critic for reviews of the students’ studio work.
Landscape Architecture as a field is critically engaged in a re-examination of the role of materials and materiality in landscape design. The Department of Landscape Architecture seeks to appoint a distinguished scholar/practitioner in design at the assistant/associate professor (tenure track) or full professor (tenured) level of landscape architecture with a focus on materials and material ecologies and design, including innovative approaches to working at the intersection of living systems with non-living materials. We invite candidates who explore how material research drives sustainable and resilient design pursuits, while simultaneously developing practices that advance contemporary debates on material culture in landscape architecture at all scales. Successful candidates will have developed a research trajectory in material expression, material flows and their associated labor pathways, technologies of fabrication and assembly, and design execution—or will demonstrate how a history of professional practice, with consideration of conceptual design, construction, and post-occupancy, will lead to a promising teaching and research agenda in this focus area of landscape architecture. Our successful appointee will provide leadership and advancement in the Material Order collection, a consortium founded by the GSD’s Frances Loeb Library and the Rhode Island School of Design Fleet Library, and joined by other prominent design schools, as the leading resource for design materials collections at academic and cultural institutions in North America.
Housed in the Department of Landscape Architecture, this position will require instruction in graduate-level design studios, lecture, workshop, and seminar courses in the context of an interdisciplinary design school with departments of architecture, urban planning and design, and advanced studies programs.
Professor, Associate Professor, or Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture (Territorial Scale)
The urgency for Landscape Architecture to investigate and consider larger scales of territory, both nationally and globally, has never been more important. The Department of Landscape Architecture seeks a distinguished scholar and/or practitioner at the assistant/associate professor (tenure track) or full professor (tenured) level in landscape architecture design and planning. The search is open to candidates who pursue a wide variety of landscape architectural subjects, such as territorial systems and their organization, rural landscapes, and their technologies (large-scale forestry, urban forestry, agronomy, engineering, energy), infrastructure, conservation, and stewardship. The most current expertise in climate adaptation and climate risk and resilience is stressed. We seek individuals who have the capacity for cross-disciplinary research and practice who will contribute to reshaping contemporary debates on environment, society, land development, and land conservation. Candidates should demonstrate a specific research trajectory or a history of professional practice that leads to promising design research agendas.
Housed in the Department of Landscape Architecture, this position will require instruction in graduate-level design studios, lecture and seminar courses in the context of an interdisciplinary design school with departments of architecture, urban planning and design, and advanced studies programs. Candidates should be landscape architects with an internationally respected record of distinguished accomplishment in their primary academic/professional endeavors in relation to infrastructure and design or design and planning at the scale of the region and should be able to interact with related planning and design disciplines at Harvard.
For more information and to apply, please visit the Harvard Academic Positions websites.
