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Vegetal City

April 5, 2016 | Gary Hilderbrand

Central Wharf Plaza, Boston, 2010, courtesy Millicent Harvey
Central Wharf Plaza, Boston, 2010, courtesy Millicent Harvey

Gary Hilderbrand is a founding partner of Reed Hilderbrand. A committed practitioner, teacher, critic, and writer, Hilderbrand is professor in practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he has taught since 1990. His honors include Harvard University’s Charles Eliot Traveling Fellowship, the Rome Prize in Landscape Architecture, the Architectural League’s Emerging Voices Award with Douglas Reed, and the 2013 American Society of Landscape Architects Firm of the Year award. Through three widely acclaimed books and two dozen essays, Hilderbrand has helped to position landscape architecture’s role in reconciling intellectual and cultural traditions with contemporary forces of urbanization and change. His essays have been featured in Landscape Architecture, Topos, Harvard Design Magazine, Architecture Boston, Clark Art Journal, Arnoldia, New England Journal of Garden History, and Land Forum.

In addition to his coauthorship in the firm’s 2012 monograph, Visible | Invisible, he produced two other monographs: Making a Landscape of Continuity: The Practice of Innocenti & Webel (1997), which was recognized by ASLA and AIGA (50 Best Books); and The Miller Garden: Icon of Modernism (1999). He has served on the editorial boards of Spacemaker Press, Harvard Design Magazine, and Landscape Architecture Magazine. As a competition juror, he has participated in Harvard’s Green Prize for Urban Design (2006 and 2013); I Premi Europeu de Paisatge Rosa Barba Barcelona (2000, 2002, and 2003); and “Suburbia Transformed” for the James Rose Center (2010). He chaired the ASLA National Awards Jury in 2005 and the ASLA Annual Student Awards Jury in 2006.

Hilderbrand has developed an abiding commitment to promoting a heightened focus on urban forestry practices through the firm’s work in cities and through design studios and sponsored research projects at Harvard. In addition, his constructed drawings of Roman topography and his personal photocollage work have been exhibited at the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum, Sotheby’s New York, Harvard University, and the Boston University Art Gallery. You may learn more about his practice at www.reedhilderbrand.com.