Adaptive Landscapes
Gena Wirth, SCAPE
Thursday, January 23, 2025
6:00 pm, Cummings Lecture Theatre
Gena Wirth, RLA, is Design Principal and Partner at SCAPE. She works with cities, community advocates and landowners to reveal the immense ecological and cultural potential of public landscapes.
As Design Principal, Gena translates research into practice, leading the design and implementation of complex, multi-stakeholder landscapes—including public and private waterfronts, regional trail systems, parks, plazas and climate adaptation plans. Within SCAPE, Gena leads firm-wide design standards, ensuring excellence from concept through construction, and serves as Principal-in-Charge for a wide range of projects across the U.S. spanning typologies and scales.
Gena is also a tenacious advocate for ecological systems design across the design fields—both as a member of the Dredge Research Collaborative, a non-profit group, and through past teaching positions at Harvard, Columbia, Syracuse and Rutgers. She also serves on SCAPE’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee (DEIC), helping advance the firm’s commitments to social and racial justice within our work and throughout the field. She holds a Master’s in Landscape Architecture and Master of Urban Planning with Distinction from the Graduate School of Design (GSD) at Harvard University and a Bachelor’s in Horticulture from the University of Delaware.
Moderated by Jane Mah Hutton.
Architecture of Belonging: The Role of Design in Indigenous Future
Joseph Kunkel, MASS Design Group
Thursday, February 13, 2025
5:15 pm, Cummings Lecture Theatre
A citizen of the Northern Cheyenne Nation, Joseph Kunkel is a community designer and educator, focused on sustainable development practices for Indigenous communities. As a Principal at MASS Design Group, Joseph directs the Sustainable Native Communities Design Lab in O’ghe P’oghe (Santa Fe, New Mexico).
Joseph’s work includes exemplary Indian housing projects, such as the Wa-Di Housing Project, a 41-unit affordable housing development supported by the National Endowment for the Arts and ArtPlace America. His research on affordable housing was developed into emerging best practices, leading to an online Healthy Homes Road Map for tribal housing development, funded by HUD’s PD&R Office.
In 2019, Joseph was awarded an Obama Fellowship in recognition of his work with Indigenous communities. In 2018, he received a Rauschenberg SEED grant from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation to expand his work in arts based community development and a 2019 Creative Capital Award for his work on the Northern Cheyenne Healing Trail. Joseph is a Fellow of the inaugural class of the Civil Society Fellowship, a partnership of ADL and The Aspen Institute, and a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network.
The University of Maryland’s Alumni Association awarded Joseph the 2021 inaugural Elaine Johnson Coates Award. Most recently, Joseph was named a 2022 Rubinger Community Fellow by the Local Initiative Support Corporation (LISC). He is a past recipient of the Enterprise Rose Architectural Fellowship.
Joseph holds a Master of Architecture & Urban Design from the University of Maryland and a Bachelor of Science in Architectural Engineering from the University of Hartford, where he graduated magna cum laude.
Moderated by David Fortin.
Water, Relationality and Design: A Conversation on Climate and Indigenous Science
David Fortin, Professor, University of Waterloo School of Architecture
Kelsey Leonard, Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Waters, Climate and Sustainability, University of Waterloo
Thursday, February 27, 2025
6:00 pm, Cummings Lecture Theatre
David Fortin is a member of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (MRAIC), a LEED accredited professional, and a registered architect in the provinces of Ontario, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Alberta. He completed his doctoral studies at the University of Edinburgh in 2009 and has since taught undergraduate and graduate courses in architectural design, history and theory, in the UK, USA, and Canada. At the McEwen School of Architecture, he developed and taught an introductory building science course emphasizing the impact of climate change on architectural thinking and maintains research interests in speculative thinking in design. David was the inaugural Associate Director of the Maamwizing Indigenous Research Institute and the Director of the McEwen School of Architecture from 2018-2021. He is a citizen of the Métis Nation of Ontario and member of the RAIC Indigenous Task Force that 'seeks ways to foster and promote indigenous design in Canada'.
Dr. Kelsey Leonard is a water scientist, legal scholar, policy expert, writer, and enrolled citizen of the Shinnecock Nation. Her work focuses on Indigenous water justice and its climatic, territorial, and governance underpinnings for our shared sustainable future. Dr. Leonard represents the Shinnecock Nation on the Mid-Atlantic Committee on the Ocean, which is charged with protecting America's ocean ecosystems and coastlines. She also serves as a member of the Great Lakes Water Quality Board of the International Joint Commission. Dr. Leonard has been instrumental in safeguarding the interests of Indigenous Nations for environmental planning, and builds Indigenous science and knowledge into new solutions for sustainable water and ocean governance.
Narratives and Numbers: Architecture in the Climate Crisis
Stephanie Carlisle, Carbon Leadership Forum, University of Washington
Thursday, March 13, 20265
6:00 pm, Cummings Lecture Theatre
Stephanie is a senior researcher at the Life Cycle Lab at the University of Washington. Her work investigates the interaction between the natural and constructed environment, including embodied carbon, life cycle assessment (LCA), urban ecology, landscape performance and supply chains and toxicity of building materials. Combining a background in environmental science and architectural design, she builds bridges between research and practice, bringing data-driven analysis and topical research to complex design problems. This experience is applied towards improving the EC3 tool as well as other carbon data initiatives at the Carbon Leadership Forum. She most recently was a Principal at KieranTimberlake Architects where she was an environmental researcher in the firm’s interdisciplinary research group. She is also a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design and a Co-Editor-In-Chief of Scenario Journal.
Moderated by Juliette Cook
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