Ways of Knowing – Ross Altheimer & Maura Rockcastle

Abstract

As the field of landscape architecture evolves to combat the issues of our time — climate change and just futures — how we practice matters. Through design research, experimental methods of design process and ideation, and provocative questioning, TEN x TEN challenges the normative environment of professional practice through process-oriented ways of working, engaging and seeing landscape. Our agency as landscape architects to address the issues of our time is grounded in part by our ability to challenge the critical foundation of the design process itself and to practice modes of discovery, and alternate WAYS OF KNOWING, as a generative act.

About the speakers

Ross Altheimer has led the planning and execution of significant cultural, community and campus projects across the United States. His collaborative methods are rooted in art and the temporality of landscape with the goal of building just communities and institutions through leveraging landscape’s capacity for transformation. Some of his current projects include 38th and Chicago Re-Envisioning, Minnesota Zoo Treetop Trail and Lakewood Cemetery Welcome Gardens + Arboretum. Altheimer has taught and lectured nationally across the disciplines of Architecture and Landscape Architecture and was a 2014-2015 Cleveland Fellow at University of Minnesota’s College of Design.

He holds a BS in Architectural Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and a MARCH + MLA from the University of Virginia where he won the Nix Fellowship to study subterranean Paris. Prior to TEN x TEN, he was an associate at Coen+Partners and the director of landscape architecture at HGA. His work has won awards and recognition from AIA and ASLA Regional and National, the GSA Design Awards and the Graham Foundation. He was also the 2013 Rome Prize Fellow in Landscape Architecture at the American Academy in Rome where he studied infrastructure and myth in contemporary Rome.

Maura Rockcastle has extensive experience working on large-scale projects, managing and navigating multi-headed stakeholder groups and complex public processes. With a background in printmaking and sculpture, Rockcastle balances a rigorous design approach with a conceptual sensibility rooted in process and craft. Her professional experience is focused on cultural, institutional, and public realm projects including the High Line Section 1, Times Square Reconstruction, and Historic Fort Snelling Revitalization. Her work spans many scales of landscape; from 4,500-acre parks, to 5-acre urban plazas, to small collaborative art installations.

Rockcastle previously was an associate for James Corner Field Operations and the Landscape Discipline Leader at Snøhetta. She holds a BFA from Cornell University and an MLA from the University of Pennsylvania, where she was awarded the Ian McHarg Prize for Excellence in Ecological Design, an American Society of Landscape Architects Certificate of Honor, and the Van Alen Traveling Fellowship. She has taught design studios at Harvard GSD, Yale School of Architecture and the University of Minnesota College of Design.