Archinect - News

McHarg Center launches blog to support young design writers

2020-01-15T14:41:00-05:00

The McHarg Center at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design of has launched Ian McBlog, a new online publication dedicated to uplifting the voices of "the rising generation of designers who will lead—and are already leading—the response to our overlapping crises of climate, capitalism, and resurgent fascism."

The blog already features two entries, one from McHarg Center director Billy Fleming explaining some of his rationale for initiating the blog.

Decrying the insular, disconnected, and sluggish nature of conventional academic publishing, Fleming writes, "Our conventional platforms for Very Serious publishing remain stubbornly disconnected from the overlapping crises that now shape every rising generation of designers. They too are slow, small, and focused on tweaking our bodies of knowledge. At their best, our peer-reviewed journals force scholars to slog through years of reviews, revisions, and resubmissions, much of which is dictated by the idiosyncrasies and...

Illustrating the massive scale of America's decarbonization challenge

2019-12-15T12:00:00-05:00

The McHarg Center at the University of Pennsylvania has published a digital atlas that attempts to communicate the wide-ranging implications of both climate change and a potential Green New Deal for the United States.

A color-coded breakdown of land uses across the country that includes agriculture, urban areas, natural landscapes, and other uses. (Courtesy of McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology.)

The 2100 Project: An Atlas for the Green New Deal, as the project is officially known, brings together work conducted over the last two years by researchers at the Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology, an initiative housed within the Weitzman School of Design at UPenn led by landscape architect and academic Billy Fleming. With the Atlas, the research center aims to answer perhaps the most pressing question of our time: "What will be lost—economically, culturally, psychologically, physically—should the climate crisis continue unabated?"

Taking stock

Top: The geographic range and...

UPenn and The Architecture Lobby to livestream "Designing a Green New Deal" symposium

2019-09-12T07:00:00-04:00

This Friday, the University of Pennsylvania will hold Designing a Green New Deal, a day-long symposium aimed at articulating a design perspective for "a still-abstract set of proposals for decarbonizing the economy, eliminating poverty, creating green, working-class jobs, and retrofitting communities for the coming effects of climate change."

The day-long event features a series of panel discussions made up of some of the leading voices in the climate, sustainability, labor, and design communities, including Peggy Deamer of The Architecture Lobby, landscape architect Kate Orff of SCAPE, and Billy Fleming, director of UPenn's Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism + Ecology.

A description for the event, which will be livestreamed below, says, "Domestically, a Green New Deal would constitute a generational investment in planning and design, reshaping the social and physical landscape of the U.S. in ways matched only by the Industrial Revolution, New Deal, and postwar suburban boom. But th...

McHarg Center exhibition highlights global ecological urbanism

2019-06-20T13:28:00-04:00

In the face of increasingly destructive climate collapse, the University of Pennsylvania's McHarg Center for Urban Ecology is launching Design with Nature Now, a sprawling survey of some of the most inventive ecologically-driven landscape infrastructure projects from around the globe.

The exhibition comes as the recently-launched McHarg Center takes shape and begins to tap into the growing national and international conversation regarding the proposed Green New Deal.

Some of the projects highlighted in the exhibition are well-known, others, less so. Divided into five discrete categories, the collected projects present a vision for how humans can use the principles of ecological urbanism to meet their own needs while also staying out of nature's way.

Some projects, like BIG's Big U plan for Battery Park in New York City, aim to retrofit existing urban ecologies for the coming era of sea level rise.

Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative. Animal crossing overpass, Banff Nati...