note: This essay was adapted from a longer version (see “harvard essay”) to satisfy differing application requirements for Harvard and UPenn’s Landscape Architecture programs. I have included both to illustrate how two essays with similar content can be tailored to different lengths.
(500 words)
Personal Statement
In nine years divided between studying and teaching architecture, I have developed a burgeoning interest in landscape architecture and view the discipline as a potential agent for positive change on the front of urban development and our relationship to the natural environment. A more specific interest in landscape urbanism is grounded in a belief that a balanced consideration of built form and exterior space would improve many North American cities.
Although I have begun to investigate topics related to landscape and the city, I regard the dedicated study of a graduate program as crucial in allowing me to contribute to the recovery of underperforming urban spaces. My knowledge of the University of Pennsylvania’s ideological bent have led me to pursue this landscape architecture program in particular. As a graduate student, a growing interest in analytical representation led me to James Corner and his sublime maps analyzing American landscapes. In the process of completing a thesis project on poetry and architecture, I became more acquainted with the interdisciplinary work of David Leatherbarrow who uniquely integrates the study of poetics, materiality, and landscape into his scholarly work. The sentiment conveyed in such work suggests that my interests in poetics and landscape urbanism could be readily pursued within the walls of the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design.
As a teaching fellow with the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, I began to think seriously about mapping as a method and artifact and the notion of fields as a conceptual framework. Both of these subjects prove valuable in contemporary readings of the city as a moving and layered entity. Implied in the notion of fields, the reciprocity of figure and ground promote a systemic way of understanding compositions and space. After developing several teaching sequences where fields framed an understanding of order in space, I had the opportunity to teach a upper-level seminar on mapping information. Beyond geospatial data, my seminar students mapped texts and assembled collages as a broadened interpretation of this longstanding method of representation.
I consider these subjects as an initial foundation for study that I mean to continue in graduate school and beyond. Implicit in my endeavor to pursue landscape architecture is an expanded knowledge about materials specific to the discipline – soil, plants, and water. While these materials are not exclusive to landscape and do not comprise the whole of its palette, the coursework in an MLA program would provide the tools necessary for employing these materials with more scientific and poetic precision.
Although my past experiences have met landscape obliquely, they have also clarified interests and convictions that clearly point to landscape as a more central focus. Amidst re-examinations of the suburban town-planning model and evolving notions of public space, landscape architecture moves more prominently into the collective psyche as an appropriate lens for addressing social and environmental challenges. This visibility requires responsibility as it affords influence, and I am inspired and humbled by the prospect of participating in so relevant a conversation.
– Submitted to PennDesign in January 2010.
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