Think like a Historian, Imagine like a Designer: A Conversation

History is a manner of thinking about the world, grounded in the places we design, construct, and inhabit. Design offers the opportunity to re-imagine the world around us, today and for the future. We might draw from history, or draw upon it; certainly, it is to be hoped that we are drawn to it, as designers and historians. The purpose of landscape history—not reducible to memory nor timelines nor styles—is to produce and share knowledge of how we have come to be who and where we are. We will gather across studios we collectively inhabit to draw attention to and lessons from the design of history. We will investigate the relationship of history as a craft and design as a mode of inquiry. As landscape historians who have chosen to teach and do their scholarship within the GSD and Harvard design community, we investigate the role of history and its methods and narratives in the understanding of place and cultural relationships to site and landscape. By thinking like a historian, designers might re-imagine both their future and our collective future.

Thaisa Way is the Program Director for Garden & Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, a Harvard University research institution located in Washington DC. She teaches and researches history, theory, and design in the College of Built Environments, University of Washington. She was awarded the Rome Prize in Landscape Architecture at the American Academy in Rome in 2016. Dr. Way’s publications focus on questions of history, gender, and shaping the landscape. Her book, Unbounded Practices: Women, Landscape Architecture, and Early Twentieth Century Design (2009, University of Virginia Press) was awarded the J.B. Jackson Book Award.  Her book From Modern Space to Urban Ecological Design: the Landscape Architecture of Richard Haag (UW  Press 2015) explores post-industrial cities and the practice of landscape architecture. She co-edited a book with Ken Yocom, Ben Spencer, and Jeff Hou,  Now Urbanism: The Future City is Here (Routledge 2014). River Cities/ City Rivers (Harvard Press 2018) is a collection of essays contributing to urban environmental history. Her latest book is GGN 1999-2018 (Timber Press, 2018).  Dr. Way is focused on a broad effort to challenge the canon of landscape architecture to engage with the inscriptions of race, gender, and class on the profession, practice, and pedagogy of the field.