Meadows Symposium: Transgressive Practices to Transformative Policies
As our society grapples with the global climate crisis and its disproportionate impact on already vulnerable populations, designers are uniquely positioned to help build a new socio-ecological ethos. The potential of landscape architecture to shape this discourse lies in its complex contextual dependencies and its engagement with dynamic and constant change.
Transgressive Practices to Transformative Policies: Landscape Change, Fast & Slow argues for a critical approach to landscape architecture grounded in the rhythm of everyday life, one that understands the material, cultural, and temporal relationships and rituals embedded within and around a site, and that enacts physical transformations by embracing incremental and ongoing practices with an openness and nimbleness to respond to new information as the design takes shape. This approach provides a means for reimagining the boundaries of our discipline in a way that more attentively responds to the conditions and practices that shape our sites. It challenges the policies that no longer serve them, while also offering new approaches to better meet the needs of tomorrow.
Transgressive Practices to Transformative Policies will consist of a symposium and book that explore a range of landscape-led projects that show the importance of design as a tool for starting and continuously tending to a dialogue about a site’s shared future; for listening deeply to the human and nonhuman communities entangled in the site and attending to their evolving needs. This project is organized by Maggie Hansen, Meadows Foundation Centennial Fellow, and sponsored by the Center for American Architecture and Design at The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture.
Symposium: Friday, February 24, 2023
Goldsmith Hall (Main Jury Room 2.110), free and open to the public
1:00 p.m. Opening Remarks
D. Michelle Addington, The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture
Maggie Hansen, The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture
1:30 p.m. Session I
Catherine Seavitt Nordenson, The City College of New York
Alison B. Hirsch, University of Southern California School of Architecture
Coffee Break
3:15 p.m. Session II
Margie Ruddick, Margie Ruddick Landscape and One Landscape
Diane Jones Allen, The University of Texas at Arlington
4:45 Session III
Discussion and Q&A
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If arriving after 5:00 p.m., please enter Goldsmith Hall via the entrance to the North Lobby, which faces the West Mall and the Texas Union. If you need accommodations for this event, please contact bridget@austin.utexas.edu at least five business days in advance.