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

CV

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



Outsiders

Harvard Design Magazine

2019

Category: Publications
From earth goddess to Dame Nature to environmental ethics to. . . now what? How about less introspection? How about more plants?                      

- Robert Riley, 1997

Now what?! Nearly six decades after the opening of the Climatron (and more than 20 years after Riley’s reflection), the anthropocentric view of nature has been unsettled. No longer fecund, fragile, nurturing, vulnerable, or reasonable, it may be that, as philosopher Isabelle Stengers claims, nature is Gaia the intruder, Gaia the indifferent, Gaia who asks nothing of us....Today, the Climatron shows its age. Fans roar above as families take selfies in front of banana plants and fake-rock waterfalls. The exterior shell no longer seems like a gossamer miracle. Although it would be easy to view the Climatron as a relic of environmental control, there is hope in its interiority. The “inside,” when truly public, is not a place to hide from ecological crisis, but a place that can engender astonishment in the messy enterprise of attempting to orchestrate nature and the built environment, of having to make better choices about whose needs are met and how.
Site Credit: August Sklar