Daniel Urban Kiley Lecture: Julie Bargmann, “Modesty”

Toxic Beauty.  Troubled Allure. Fallow Fairness.  Not Vacant, Open. Not Abandoned, Changing.

D.I.R.T. cultivates a perverse attraction and an unapologetic approach to wrecked landscapes.

Not Restorative, Regenerative.

The work holds back.  It doesn’t make everything perfectly okay.  The work listens. It hears them above trying to make sense, below the ground producing heritage.  The work hurts.  It flips preconceptions of stuck minds.  The work is messy.  It’s all about finding.  The work emerges.

It doesn’t descend.  The work leaves.  It lets you in.

Modesty is a Manifesto calling for restraint when we don’t know what’s next.

Julie Bargmann is internationally recognized as an innovative designer in building regenerative landscapes. She founded D.I.R.T. studio in 1992 to research, design and build projects with passion and rigor. Born and raised in New Jersey, where from an early age the belching factories and monumental landfills attracted her, Julie is a straight-talker, not afraid to provoke in order to tease out what matters most about places, especially the post-industrial. Her background in sculpture influences the use of simple form that emerges from sites’ existing, unearthed and unlikely material for design. Julie’s frank, hands-on design approach informs her role as Professor at the University of Virginia, where she leads investigations with students into derelict terrain, imagining renewed sites of cultural and ecological production.

Julie earned a fine arts degree from Carnegie-Mellon University and a Master of Landscape Architecture degree at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She received the American Academy in Rome Fellowship and the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum’s National Design Award. D.I.R.T. projects have gained several Honor Awards from the American Society of Landscape Architects, and Detroit’s Core City Park garnered the October 2020 cover story in Landscape Architecture.