Welcome 

Here you'll find an overview of my work in landscape architecture, urbanism, and teaching. I focus on contextual and ecology-informed design, inclusive green places in cities, and novel and restored ecosystems at multiple scales. 

I've collaborated with action research colleagues on resilience-building projects in south Asia, Brazil and sub-Saharan Africa—places that struggle, to varying degrees, with impacts from climate change, a history of exploitation, and bad governance. I'm currently researching convivial greenstreets in urban cores and the state of professional landscape planting practices in the northeast US, with a focus on climate change and biodiversity. 

During my +8 years of consulting in Ontario I was fortunate to have some great mentors and talented role models from multiple professions: landscape architecture, urban and regional planning, ecology and botany, archaeology, art, architecture, regional economics, soil science, and engineering. It was when I shifted to campus that I realized interdisciplinarity wasn't unreservedly accepted as a good way to tackle complex problems. 

More detail on my work in green urbanism, ecology-informed design, and international research and teaching is fleshed out in the following pages, including select project profiles and PDFs of most of my publications.

In 1993 I arrived at Penn State University and soon came to cherish working with students in studio, out on site, and on education abroad forays. My teaching portfolio included graduate and upper-level undergraduate studios and applied ecology and planting methods. I tried to instill in my students an appetite for holistic and meaningful design practice. We strove to: craft welcoming and inclusive places; promote biodiversity and natural processes that sustain life; tap into the intrinsic links between region, sub-system and site; confront wicked problems (climate change, social polarization, etc.) to the extent possible in each commission; make space for beauty—all while tending to the daily task of creative and technical competency. 

Community-engaged learning has always been a key tenet of my teaching philosophy. I led or co-led over 40 public scholarship courses that challenged students with messy and exhilarating community-based projects. These ranged in scale from small landscape installations to neighborhood regenerative strategies to longer term territorial and peri-urban visions. 

Most notably, from 1996–1999 and 2008–2023, my award-winning Pittsburgh Studio introduced students to a relational process of designing in and with underserved post-industrial communities. Free of the conventional client-consultant model, and through the Franco Harris Pittsburgh Center, neighborhood organizations invited us in as working partners. Our mutually-beneficial collaborations thrived on reciprocal learning and design co-authorship. 

The results were catalytic. Our partners experienced the power of design and were inspired to further action. And studio alums entered professional practice with unusual fluency in, and commitment to, engaged democratic design. 

The studio was recognized by the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, Penn State University, Campus Compact, and the Journal of Higher Education and Outreach.

I remain professionally active and have recently been inducted into the Penn State Emeritus Academy.

Feel free to contact me.