DANIELLE N. CHOI

Danielle N. Choi is a landscape architect, writer, and educator. Her research explores landscape design as a cultural practice that brings technology, infrastructure, and ecology into dialogue with public life. She currently teaches at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Prior to her academic appointment, Choi practiced in landscape studios in New York City and Berlin.

CONTACT

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PUBLICATIONS
Design Beyond Nature
Our Green is Dark, Almost Black
Forest Urbanisms - Review
Is Landscape Labor?
Where Were We?
Risk and Fun
Outsiders
Juvenile Delinquents
The “Not-Me Creation”


RESEARCHOrigin Stories
Continental Divides
TEACHINGStudios
Archived Landscapes
Island Observatory
PROJECTSMonument Circle
ABC No Rio
Photo Hunt Garden
Past Practice
EVENTS, EXHIBITIONSClimates of Control
Energy Corridors
Natural Attachments
Forest Futures
Plants as Technological Objects
Whirring, Worrying, Blending, Blurring
Archived Landscapes



Denaturing Preservation

Fresh Water, Mary Pat McGuire and Jessica Henson, eds. 

2019

Category: Publications

Early twentieth-century infrastructural, scientific, and aesthetic practices remade the Illinois River Valley as Chicago’s industrial hinterland. Tracing material flows of wastewater from the Sanitary & Ship Canal alongside ecological surveys by the Illinois Natural History Survey and Jens Jensen’s landscape writings, this chapter reconstructs competing “cultures of nature” that framed a rapidly altered river as primeval, degraded, or improvable. I critique how preservation, conservation, and restoration have been mobilized to stabilize particular historical trajectories, and argue for interpretive design practices that expose the political ecology of these selective narratives and how they shape contemporary landscape interventions.
Site Credit: August Sklar