Gary Hilderbrand, the recipient of the 2017 American Society of Landscape Architects Design Medal and professor in practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, describes landscape architecture’s evolving consequential role in shaping contemporary cities. Urban streets, squares, and parks support the city’s ecological performance and define its spatial experience. Yet much of the city’s living infrastructure remains underestimated or invisible. Hilderbrand’s academic research on the urban forest complements and extends a long arc of design commissions for his firm, Reed Hilderbrand, in New York, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Austin, Columbus, Tampa, and Boston. In this conversation, Hilderbrand will discuss the urban landscape with the Rome-based architect Alberto Iacovoni.

Hilderbrand (FAAR, FASLA) is a founding principal of Reed Hilderbrand, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His firm has been recognized with more than eighty-five regional and national design awards. He is widely published as an author and critic on landscape architecture practice and has written three monographs: Making a Landscape of Continuity: The Practice of Innocenti and Webel (1997); The Miller Garden: Icon of Modernism (1999); and Visible Invisible: Landscape Works of Reed Hilderbrand (2013), published with Douglas Reed. In 2015, Reed and Hilderbrand were voted among the top five “most admired practitioners” by the members of ASLA’s Professional Practice Network.

Hilderbrand is the Mercedes T. and Sid R. Bass Landscape Architect in Residence at the American Academy in Rome in fall 2017.

The event will be held in English. You can watch it live at https://livestream.com/aarome.

The 2017–18 Conversations/Conversazioni series is sponsored by the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation.