Plants as Inventors: A lecture from Catherine Seavitt

Catherine Seavitt is Professor and Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design. She is also the Martin and Margy Meyerson Chair of Urbanism, Co-Executive Director of The Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology, and Creative Director of LA+, an interdisciplinary journal of landscape architecture. Seavitt’s scholarship and design work examine the entanglements of public space and health through the lens of ecology, policy, and novel plant science. Taking a multiscalar approach to ecological knowledge and design, she studies the potential for incorporating indeterminate, collective, and nonbinary thinking in support of social, environmental, and multispecies justice.

A registered architect and landscape architect, Seavitt is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects, and a recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and Graham Foundation grants for research in Brazil. Her publications include Four Corridors (Hatje Cantz, 2019), Structures of Coastal Resilience (Island Press, 2018), Depositions: Roberto Burle Marx and Public Landscapes under Dictatorship (University of Texas Press, 2018), and On the Water: Palisade Bay (Hatje Cantz, 2010). Additionally, her writings have been featured in Architectural Review, Artforum, Avery Review, Harvard Design Magazine, JoLA, LA+, Landscape Architecture Magazine, and Topos.

Prior to joining the University of Pennsylvania, Seavitt served as Professor and Director of the Master of Landscape Architecture Program at the City College of New York. She has taught at the Cooper Union, Princeton University, the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the Parsons School of Design, Louisiana State University, and the University of Virginia. She received her Bachelor of Architecture from the Cooper Union and her Master of Architecture from Princeton University.

​Lectures made possible by the Jean Labatut Memorial Lectures in Architecture.