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

Is Landscape Labor?

Landscape is . . . !
Gareth Doherty and Charles Waldheim, eds.

2025

Category: Publications


“Working landscapes” convert natural matter into human provisions and locally maintain environmental life support systems. “Worked landscapes” highlight the human labor embedded in sites through the ongoing, deliberate, and coordinated efforts of designers and non-professionals alike. Drawing on philosopher Hannah Arendt’s distinctions between labor and work—to harness natural processes for human use and to continuously renew and reinvent these relationships through deliberate human action—the chapter argues for a synthesis of biological needs (to make a living) and cultural desire (to make a life).  
Site Credit: August Sklar