Danielle N. Choi

Danielle Narae Choi is a licensed landscape architect and an Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she leads design studios and research seminars. Her work examines landscape design as a cultural practice that synthesizes broader concerns of science, technology, and infrastructure. Choi’s current research project is an environmental study of 20th-century interior landscapes. A subset of public projects were volatile sites of negotiation between plant vitality and human comfort, colonial botany and situated traditional knowledge, new aesthetic agendas, and entrenched urban crisis.

Choi’s writing has been published in the Journal of Architectural Education, Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes, Landscape Architecture Magazine, and in edited volumes on landscape and urbanism. Before her appointment at the GSD, Choi practiced professionally in Berlin and New York City, leading the strategy and design of complex projects ranging in scale from gardens to parks to urban framework plans. Choi draws upon this experience to examine the realms of knowledge, social relations, and labor required to produce (and that are produced by) living landscapes. Choi holds a degree in art history from the University of Chicago and a Master's in Landscape Architecture from the GSD.

Project: Learning with Community: Design Pedagogy and Shared Resources for Climate Adaptation

This project will enhance course programming through community engagement for a landscape architecture design studio at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD). Through speculative design propositions, this course examines urbanized landscapes at imminent climate risk in coastal Massachusetts. Students and the teaching team have recognized that our informed assumptions should be tested against local, situated knowledge, that our work in the studio can be helpful to the realization of community visions, and that the diverse challenges, worries, and desires of residents who are community leaders (but not design professionals) may reveal emerging issues of climate concern to coastal communities more broadly. Known models of engaged scholarship must be adapted to the particularities of this course: its large size, its role in the core curriculum, and the sensitive nature of speaking with communities about climate risk. To date, the studio has amassed and analyzed many publicly accessible spatial data, documents, and resources. The primary product of this proposal is a compilation of this data to be shared with nondesign professionals in a format that is graphically legible and engaging as a basis for discussion, thus inviting a two-way exchange of knowledge. It will also serve as a pilot model for interaction that could be integrated into future design studio curricula.