Steiner Offers Vision of 'Design for a Vulnerable Planet'

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Frederick Steiner will present "Design for a Vulnerable Planet" on Sept. 10 at Hembree Auditorium.

Frederick R. Steiner will present a lecture titled “Design for a Vulnerable Planet” at 5:30 p.m. Monday, Sept. 10, at Hembree Auditorium (Agricultural, Food, and Life Sciences Building, Room 107E) on the University of Arkansas campus, as part of this year’s Fay Jones School of Architecture lecture series.

Steiner is the dean of the School of Architecture and Henry M. Rockwell Chair in Architecture, both at The University of Texas at Austin. He has worked with local, state, and federal agencies on diverse environmental plans and designs. Steiner is the current president of the Hill Country Conservancy (a land trust) and past chair and current secretary of Envision Central Texas (a non-governmental regional planning organization).

As a Fulbright-Hays scholar in 1980, he conducted research on ecological planning at the Wageningen University, The Netherlands. In 1998, he was a Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. A Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects, Steiner was a visiting professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China,  from 2005-2007. He received his Ph.D. and M.A. degrees in city and regional planning and a Master of Regional Planning from the University of Pennsylvania. He earned a Master of Community Planning and a B.S. in Design from the University of Cincinnati. Steiner received an honorary Master of Philosophy in Human Ecology from the College of the Atlantic.

Steiner has published numerous articles and books. His most recent books include Urban Ecological Design (with Danilo Palazzo, 2011), Design for a Vulnerable Planet (2011), Planning and Urban Design Standards (Student Edition with Kent Butler, 2007), The Essential Ian McHarg: Writings on Design and Nature (2006), and Human Ecology: Following Nature’s Lead (2002).

Design for a Vulnerable Planet sounds a call for designers and planners to go beyond traditional concepts of sustainability toward innovative new design that fosters regeneration and resilience.

Drawing on his own and others’ experiences across three continents, Steiner advocates design practice grounded in ecology and democracy and informed by critical regionalism and reflection. He begins by establishing the foundation for a more ecological approach to planning and design, adopting a broad view of ecology as encompassing human and natural, urban and wild environments.

Steiner explores precedents for human ecological design provided by architect Paul Cret, landscape architect Ian McHarg, and developer George Mitchell while discussing their planning for The University of Texas at Austin campus, the Lake Austin watershed, and The Woodlands. He then focuses on emerging Texas urbanism and extends his discussion to broader considerations beyond the Lone Star State, including regionalism, urbanism, and landscape in China and Italy. He examines the lessons to be learned from human and natural disasters such as 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and the BP oil spill. Finally, Steiner offers a blueprint for designing with nature to help heal the planet’s vulnerabilities.

Admission is free, with limited seating. For more information, contact 479-575-4704 or architecture.uark.edu.