Micah Stanek

Lecturer in Landscape Architecture

“I think it's second nature to me to mediate. I want to be a synthesizer. I understand why scientific disciplines follow strict protocols. But landscape architecture asks us to experiment with the rules of the game because landscape architecture is a cultural practice.”

“We’re trying to give people what they want, and we are also trying to produce new culture and relations to our environment. Landscape architecture is very much like human ecology [the study of the interactions between humans and nature in different cultures]. We cannot observe the world without recognizing: we are the observer, in the system, and shaping the system. So, we are very interested in trying to understand various elemental ecological principles this summer from the scientists. We are also asking, ‘How do we want to see our relationship to the environment in the future?’”

What is something people do not understand about your work that you'd like them to know?

“I don't know if that many people know about my work! A lot of people think that landscape architecture is an artistic pursuit. For example, one assumption is that we are just interested in beauty. Or, if we are talking about ecology and design another assumption is that we are interested in putting things back to the way they were in some past idea of nature. I am interested in ecological design, but for me that means neither pure restoration nor giving up. We still have ecological function from the past because we still have some biodiversity, evolved to our specific environment. We are interested in the whole biodiversity picture, not just aesthetics and function, but also larger questions about how ecosystems are changing and how we are changing.”

“But we're also interested in things other than aesthetics and ecological function. We are interested in how people behave if we make a design for them to exercise some kinds of actions or to use the space differently. Public space can be awfully prescribed or public space can invite imaginative behavior. We recognize relationships that we call ‘ecology,’ but we also want to talk about unseen relationships that are there or could be there.”

“We are co-creating ecology. Through various kinds of research we can all contribute to our understanding of the interaction of organisms in the world. In our environment, we are defining, looking at, naming, trying to understand, and so we are also generating new ecological relationships, therefore producing ecology.”

Micah leads the Landscape Agents team. Learn more about their work designing urban research gardens here.