The Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania has announced that Catherine Seavitt Nordenson will be taking over as the next chair of its Department of Landscape Architecture, effective July 1st.

The current Spitzer School of Architecture professor and director of CCNY's Master of Landscape Architecture program will replace Richard Weller and will be the third woman ever to lead the department following Anne Whiston Spirn and professor Sonja Dümpelmann, who had been serving as its interim chair since last spring.

A press announcement from the university called Seavitt “one of the most admired scholar-practitioners of her generation.” Her career began as an Associate at New York’s Atelier Raimund Abraham in 1993 and has made stops at Pei Cobb Freed and Partners in addition to the academic appointments at Parsons, the University of Virginia, and two of her alma maters Princeton and the Cooper Union. 

Seavitt, both a registered architect and landscape architect, also established her own eponymous studio in New York in 2007. 

The Weitzman School of Design said: “Her research and publications examine the role of landscape architects as significant participants at the intersection of political power, environmental advocacy, and public health, particularly as seen through the design of equitable public space and policy.” Titles include 2018’s Depositions: Roberto Burle Marx and Public Landscapes under Dictatorship and Structures of Coastal Resilience (with Guy Nordenson and Julia Chapman); and 2010’s On the Water: Palisade Bay.

Seavitt also previously worked with New York's Regional Plan Association to develop an ecological design strategy as part of its Fourth Regional Plan in 2019. According to the school, she has received a Rockefeller Foundation grant to author a resiliency plan for Jamaica Bay, Queens. Seavitt was elected to the Council of Fellows by the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) in 2021. 

“I have long admired the landscape architecture department at Penn for its multi-scalar, multi-species ecological approach to the public realm,” she said in a statement. “I’m very excited to advance the design inventions and pedagogical transformations that have been hallmarks of the program for decades.”

“Catherine is deeply invested in confronting the ethical crises facing the design professions, from climate change and decarbonization to racial justice and public health,” Weitzman School dean Fritz Steiner added finally. “She understands that higher education has a special role to play in advancing this work.”