Instagram story viewer> @gsd_mla> Tagged

Harvard GSD Department of Landscape Architecture

@gsd_mla

28.1K

followers

366

following

@harvardgsd | @gsd_asla
GLG Registration: https://tinyurl.com/33vcyp6h

POSTS STORIES REELS TAGGED

Spend a day in the life with Saniya Malhotra @forestrani, MLA ‘28!

📆 Interested in learning more about the Landscape Architecture program? We have a virtual open house on November 5 (9am-1pm)!

🔗 Go to our link in bio and choose “Admissions” to find out more.

➡️ Follow @gsdadmissions for more admissions content, and @gsd_mla to see what our MLA students are up to.

841

25

Forthcoming Studio Publication
Echoes of Empire: Canada’s Pacific Northwest is experiencing accelerating glacial retreat, intensifying atmospheric rivers, prolonged drought, and increasing wildfires. These events affect not only humans but also render more-than-human ecologies vulnerable. The relentless pursuit of economic growth fuels an ever-expanding demand for resource extraction, erasing, reshaping, and altering cultures while terraforming landscapes. This drive for control over resources, environments, and people accelerates extraction, destroying biodiversity zones, displacing communities, and exacerbating racial, social, and economic disparities as they become more deeply woven into the planetary polycrisis.
The British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924 showcased British colonies and their valuable natural resources as evidence of the empire’s extractive triumph. The exhibition presented Canada as an inexhaustible resource, highlighting the nation’s timber wealth and mineral abundance as evidence of the empire’s prosperity. This option studio revisits that exhibition to trace the extractive geographies it celebrated and their present condition in the midst of planetary crisis.

Images and Work by Racha Doughman & Darius Bottoroff
Echoes of Empire Option Studio, Harvard GSD

221

8

Forthcoming Studio Publication
Echoes of Empire: Canada’s Pacific Northwest is experiencing accelerating glacial retreat, intensifying atmospheric rivers, prolonged drought, and increasing wildfires. These events affect not only humans but also render more-than-human ecologies vulnerable. The relentless pursuit of economic growth fuels an ever-expanding demand for resource extraction, erasing, reshaping, and altering cultures while terraforming landscapes. This drive for control over resources, environments, and people accelerates extraction, destroying biodiversity zones, displacing communities, and exacerbating racial, social, and economic disparities as they become more deeply woven into the planetary polycrisis.
The British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924 showcased British colonies and their valuable natural resources as evidence of the empire’s extractive triumph. The exhibition presented Canada as an inexhaustible resource, highlighting the nation’s timber wealth and mineral abundance as evidence of the empire’s prosperity. This option studio revisits that exhibition to trace the extractive geographies it celebrated and their present condition in the midst of planetary crisis.

Images and Work by Flora Klien & Isabel Andrews
Echoes of Empire Option Studio, Harvard GSD

915

2

Forthcoming Studio Publication
Echoes of Empire: Canada’s Pacific Northwest is experiencing accelerating glacial retreat, intensifying atmospheric rivers, prolonged drought, and increasing wildfires. These events affect not only humans but also render more-than-human ecologies vulnerable. The relentless pursuit of economic growth fuels an ever-expanding demand for resource extraction, erasing, reshaping, and altering cultures while terraforming landscapes. This drive for control over resources, environments, and people accelerates extraction, destroying biodiversity zones, displacing communities, and exacerbating racial, social, and economic disparities as they become more deeply woven into the planetary polycrisis.
The British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924 showcased British colonies and their valuable natural resources as evidence of the empire’s extractive triumph. The exhibition presented Canada as an inexhaustible resource, highlighting the nation’s timber wealth and mineral abundance as evidence of the empire’s prosperity. This option studio revisits that exhibition to trace the extractive geographies it celebrated and their present condition in the midst of planetary crisis.

Images and Work by Luke Zili He & Alec Melkonian

291

9

An absolutely beautiful day for a field trip to the farm to explore and observe important successional landscape concepts, food webs, and plant + animal dynamics with my *amazing* Ecologies, Techniques, and Technologies students!

@mcldlandlab
@mcldllc
@gsd_mla
@harvardgsd

269

1

36 hours in Gund Hall | What fun to be back for @harvardgsd Alumni + Dean’s Council meetings that rolled into #gsdcomeback filled with learning, celebrating, catching up with old friends, and meeting new ones. Congratulations to the GSD Alumni Award winners! @gsd_ac

82

4

"Retention Pond/Civic Space?" transforms Boston City Hall Plaza into a civic landscape that responds to the city’s growing vulnerability to extreme stormwater events. In this project, Maria Chen Liang (MLA I ’28) @maria_chenliang developed the work in STU 1111 (Fall 2025), taught by Pablo Perez-Ramos.

Projected increases in annual flood exceedance highlight the need for public spaces that function both socially and hydrologically. This proposal transforms City Hall Plaza into both a civic gathering space and an active system for water collection, retention, and infiltration. Through contour studies and physical modeling, the design develops a language of slopes and sunken forms that choreograph water flow into three shallow but vast retention pods. These depressions act as retention ponds during major storms, choreographing water flow across the sloping ground. In dry conditions, they support public festivals and demonstrations, allowing the landscape to shift between ecological function and civic use. Permeable brick and stone paving, paired with native plantings such as red maple, little bluestem, switchgrass, and buttonbush, enhance infiltration across the site. Combined, these systems enable the plaza to infiltrate roughly 33% of incoming stormwater. The project transforms flood risk into a visible, educational, and engaging public experience, making climate resilience a central feature of Boston's urban civic landscape. Black-and-white photograph of a large physical site model of Boston City Hall Plaza and surrounding downtown buildings. The City Hall building and redesigned plaza are highlighted in white at the center, surrounded by darker massing models of adjacent buildings.

2k

11

Next week, research teams from LAF's 2026 Case Study Investigation (CSI) Program will highlight the findings from their work to quantify the benefits of exemplary built landscape projects. In the second of three webinars, three teams from the 2026 CSI program present the projects they evaluated, which demonstrate how design can make ecological systems, cultural experiences, and environmental processes visible, accessible, and meaningful to the people who use them:

-The Clark Art Institute (Williamstown, MA. Reed Hilderbrand + Harvard University)
-The Pilot School (Wilmington, DE. ForeSite Associates + University of Delaware)
-Gretna City Park (Gretna, LA. CARBO Landscape Architecture + Louisiana State University)
@reedhilderbrand | @gsd_mla | @udcanr | @carbo.la | @lsu_rrsla
Register to join us Wednesday, October 14, 3-4pm EST. Find the registration link in bio!
1.0 PDH (LA CES/HSW) may be earned upon completion of a short quiz following the webinar.

Want to see more of the 2026 CSI research?
The first webinar in this series will be held on Tuesday, October 13 and the final webinar is on Thursday, October 22. And Look for the final case studies to start rolling out on LandscapePerformance.org later this month.

49

0

Ho-Ting (Jenny) Liu is a landscape architect and Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at Chung Yuan Christian University in Taiwan. She holds a Master of Landscape Architecture from @harvardgsd @gsd_mla and a Bachelor of Arts in Biology, Geography and Theater Studies from @macalestercollege. Before returning to Taiwan and entering academia, she practiced with AECOM, SWA Group, Reed Hilderbrand, and Raymond Jungles, working across large-scale urban and waterfront projects, cultural landscapes, and private high-end gardens in the United States and Asia.

Her interdisciplinary background informs a practice grounded in active listening—revealing the visible and invisible layers of landscape systems and seeking more resilient and meaningful relationships between people and place. She is a licensed landscape architect in the United States and a SITES Accredited Professional.

In her conversation with Julia Gamolina (@julia.gamolina), Jenny talks about global citizenship, her return to Taiwan, and a sense of home.

Link in bio and stories. Portrait of Jenny by Emma Xue.

#madamearchitect #landscapearchitect #landscapearchitecture #mentor #leader

3

2

Greetings from Los Angeles!!! BSLA and the New England chapters represented(!) at the ASLA National Conference...

🌴😎 Swipe for a few snapshots

New England showed up in people and in projects; on stage, in the expo, and throughout the streets and spaces of #ASLA2026, bringing issues and ideas of our region.

From Chapter Presidents Council and Trustee meetings with chapter leaders nationwide, to chance encounters with colleagues and classmates, to new products and initiatives...

We loved seeing emerging professionals, students, firm leaders and industry friends sharing challenges and opportunities to advance our work, together.

Carbon sequestration to inclusive play, urban forests to tree health, human rehab to waterfront resilience...

There was also the celebration of milestones.

Gary Hilderbrand, thank you for your tenure as chair of the landscape architecture program at Harvard GSD!
👏👏👏

Did you know? The conclusion of the ASLA National Conference means the transfer of power to new ASLA officers.

Michelle Crowley, thank YOU for your tenure as president of BSLA!!!
💚💚💚
Welcome President Andrew ---

#landscapearchitecturecommunity

143

7

A repost from @landcollective. If you’re at the conference, please come by to say “hey” this Wednesday.

Attending National ASLA this year? Check out David Rubin and Sara Zewde’s talk! The inaugural “In Conversation” session will host David and Sara in open discussion exploring their practices, and how they both have worked hard to fuse design excellence with welcoming studio cultures.

#nationalasla #asla #landscapearchitecture #workculture urbandesig

67

1

Where Flamingos Return, Life Returns reframes lithium mine closure in the Salar de Atacama as a long-term ecological responsibility measured through the return and persistence of flamingo life.

In this project, Zeliang Lyu (MLA II ’28) @rickyllvv proposes a Flamingo-Led Mine Closure Framework that uses flamingos as living indicators for evaluating ecological recovery across a shared hydrological basin. Developed in STU 1407, the Spring 2026 Atacama studio, taught by Pablo Pérez-Ramos, the project links basin-scale governance with site-scale landscape repair at the Monturaqui–Negrillar–Tilopozo aquifer. The project was recognized with the Honor Award, General Design, from the American Society of Landscape Architects (@nationalasla).

The framework expands responsibility beyond individual mining concession boundaries through overlapping zones of remediation, hydrological influence, and shared stewardship. Rather than evaluating mine closure solely through engineering stability and site safety, it introduces ecological thresholds tied to flamingo habitat, wetland function, and long-term monitoring. A two-hectare flamingo sanctuary serves as an initial refuge cell within a larger proposed wetland network.

At the site scale, the project adapts ancestral water-seeding practices to capture, slow, store, and redistribute seasonal runoff. Regraded channels, shallow basins, and reused mining roads extend wetness into the dry season, while nest-inspired topographies create gradients of water depth and salinity for nesting, foraging, resting, and refuge. Existing mining structures are retained and repurposed for rescue, quarantine, recovery, monitoring, and community ritual.

Together, these strategies transform the physical traces of extraction into instruments of recovery, connecting water management, habitat restoration, Indigenous stewardship, and mine governance. Rather than treating closure as the end of extraction, the project positions it as an ongoing responsibility to sustain life across the basin. Close-up photograph of a landscape model showing textured terrain cut by narrow channels. White mesh surfaces are suspended between slender wooden posts, with miniature vegetation visible in the background.

2k

4