“Landscape Thinking,” a special symposium honoring University of Oregon landscape architecture Professor Emeritus Kenneth Helphand on his retirement from forty years of teaching, will be held Saturday, May 25, from 8:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. at the UO Ford Alumni Center, 1720 E. 13th Avenue, Eugene. The event will help fund an endowment for a lecture series named in honor of Helphand. The deadline to reserve tickets is May 15.
The symposium will bring together top scholars and practitioners of landscape architecture to enlighten, delight, and inspire students, professionals, faculty members, alumni, and friends to recognize Helphand and to create a meaningful tribute. Helphand retired from full-time teaching in fall 2012.
The symposium is associated with the establishment of the Kenneth I. Helphand Endowed Lecture Fund at the University of Oregon Foundation, thanks to a number of generous contributors. The fund will give students the benefit of learning from top scholars for years to come.
Lecturers at the symposium will include Helphand; Anne Spirn of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Walter J. Hood and E. Marc Treib of the University of California, Berkeley; Laurie D. Olin of the University of Pennsylvania; Ben Helphand of NeighborSpace, Chicago; Cynthia Girling of the University of British Columbia; Daphna Greenstein of Greenstein Har-Gil Landscape Architecture Ltd., in Haifa, Israel; Robert Riley of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; Tal Alon-Mozes of the Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel; and Liska Clemence Chan of the UO.
A graduate of Brandeis University and Harvard's Graduate School of Design, Helphand is the Philip H. Knight Professor of Architecture and Allied Arts Emeritus at the UO, where he has taught courses in landscape history, theory, and design since 1974. He has received distinguished teaching awards from the UO and the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture.
Helphand is among the elite worldwide in landscape history and theory. He has guest lectured at dozens of universities internationally and is a frequent visiting professor at the Technion the Israel Institute of Technology. He has authored numerous of articles and reviews on topics in landscape history and theory, with a particular interest in contemporary American landscape. From 1994 to 2002 he served as editor of Landscape Journal.
An award-winning author, Helphand has written Colorado: Visions of an American Landscape (1991), Yard Street Park: The Design of Suburban Open Space (with Cynthia Girling, 1994), Dreaming Gardens: Landscape Architecture and the Making of Modern Israel (2002), and Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime (2006). Defiant Gardens received international recognition, winning awards from the American Society of Landscape Architects, Environmental Design Research Association/Places, The Foundation for Landscape Studies, and others, and was named one of the Books of the Year by the United Kingdom’s New Statesman.
Helphand is a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects (FASLA) and the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture, an honorary member of the Israel Association of Landscape Architects, a recipient of the Bradford Williams Medal, a recipient of a Graham Foundation Grant, and former chair of the Senior Fellows in Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks.
Above: Helphand’s book Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime received international recognition, winning awards from the American Society of Landscape Architects and others and was named one of the Books of the Year by the United Kingdom’s New Statesman.“Draw to Think | Think to Draw,” drawings by Helphand, will be on exhibit in the Wallace and Grace Hayden Gallery in Lawrence Hall, at the UO School of Architecture and Allied Arts during the symposium.
The symposium is presented by the Department of Landscape Architecture, the Fuller Center for Productive Landscapes, and the School of Architecture and Allied Arts.
Tickets for the symposium, which includes breakfast, luncheon, and reception, are $100. Registration for the reception and toasts only is $25. Tickets may be purchased online or at (541) 346-4363. Or send payment to the A&AA Development Office, 5235 University of Oregon, Eugene Oregon, 97403. For assistance, contact A&AA Development, aaadev@uoregon.edu, (541) 346-3697.
