“Stories of Place: Contextual Design in Contemporary Cities," Zube Lecture Presented by Kate Tooke
Join UMass LARP for “Stories of Place: Contextual Design in Contemporary Cities," a Zube Lecture presented by Kate Tooke, a landscape architect and principal of Agency Landscape + Planning in Cambridge, MA. This lecture will be held on Thursday, November 5th, at 4:00 p.m. in the John W. Olver Design Building Lecture Hall (room 170). Admission is free and open to the public. Snacks and drinks will be provided.
A recording of this lecture will be posted to UMass LARP's YouTube channel after the event.
About the Talk
No act of design exists in a vacuum: context matters. The cultural and physical setting of a place tells stories that can inspire, deepen and alter the craft of landscape architecture. But listening to these influences and allowing them to truly shape design is an inherently messy art. This lecture will unpack a simple framework for understanding and applying contextual design in complex urban public realm projects, and explore several case studies through this lens: Boston City Hall Plaza, Lexington’s Gatton Park and Newark’s Ironline Greenway.
About the Speaker
Kate Tooke, a landscape architect and principal of Agency Landscape + Planning, has focused her career on the intersection of community and public space. She leverages a diverse background as an educator, an engineer and a landscape architect into a practice unabashedly passionate about connecting people to the urban environment. Kate’s listening-oriented approach to project leadership as well as her strategic thinking, design eye, and technical acumen have been instrumental in the success of diverse projects ranging from master planning to site-scale work and extending coast to coast – including Boston’s City Hall Plaza and Copley Square, Los Angeles’ Wilmington Waterfront Promenade, Lexington’s Gatton Park and New Jersey’s newest State Park, the Greenway. Beyond practice, Kate is a prominent national voice in playground design and research, has served on the board of directors of the Landscape Architecture Foundation and lectured at Universities across the country.