A scholar of the history, theory, and design of the built environment, Dr. Way’s research, publications, and courses challenge established narratives of the emergence of the design professions by exploring the ways that gender, class, and race were shaping forces. She is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome (2016), where she was the Mercedes T. Bass Landscape Architect in Residence in 2023, and an elected Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects (2018). Building on her scholarship on histories of the design professions, she is a founding leader of Built Environment Deans Advancing Change, an initiative to establish a community of under-represented early career design school faculty from a diversity of backgrounds and experiences. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Society of Architectural Historians, and as an advisor for Snøhetta.
Why Vancouver? Do you have prior history with the city?
I have an affinity for the west coast, specifically with the Pacific Northwest. When I arrived here I spent time walking through the city, and I was pretty impressed. It seems Vancouver has a lot more experimentation, it has been willing to try a variety of responses to urban challenges; different approaches to architecture, some more successful than others. The housing options, the different ways to hold land, the public library downtown for example, it doesn’t look like anything around it, whether you like it or not, for better or worse. I’ve been impressed by Vancouver and its design community and literacy.
Why SALA?
I wanted to come to a design school that was committed to interdisciplinarity across the design professions, and I sense that here. I am a big proponent of working in community and I hope to play a role in developing and cementing it into the school’s culture. I also wanted to work with others who are truly trying to make a difference for the future. SALA’s commitment to both sustainability and equity is inspiring. And the design community in this region, it is deeply creative and aspirational and I found that exciting.
Having worked with indigenous communities in Washington, DC, and having spent time developing a relationship with the stewards who are still caring for the land on which I worked, I also really wanted to go someplace that was thinking about what it means to live and teach on stolen, unceded, ancestral lands and waters. About how we come to know a place while acknowledging the complex narratives of such places. UBC isn’t perfect in this process, and is nowhere near finished, but they’re farther along than the east coast of the USA. As a school, we are accountable for learning and understanding what that looks like for us and our students. How do we bring Indigenous knowledge and approaches into teaching and research? It starts with deep listening. I wanted to be in community in a design school that was open to such practices. I was intrigued by a school that might really engage with difficult challenges of materials, structures, land and waters, people and community.
Have your impressions of SALA’s identity as a school changed between accepting the director role and actually starting it? What was your impression of the school before beginning the position?
I came to SALA with a broader understanding of UBC as a research university, and what the approaches are to leadership. I knew SALA was a school with great faculty and students, with potential for something possibly greater than the sum of its parts.
In my time here I feel more confident about that. There have been things that have totally impressed me such as how warmly I’ve been welcomed, which in academia is not always true. So far I’ve only been impressed. I’ve gone to events such as Good Times and the lecture series and forums at Inform Interiors, and they’ve all been packed with students, professors, and professionals. The professional community is very engaged and welcoming. And the design literacy of this region is remarkable.
Can you tell us about the evolution of your career from academia into leadership?
Academia is my third career. I started by running a small plant nursery. I ran a childcare center for 200+ kids, then got involved in higher ed administration. In the middle of all that, I was also head kitchen gardener at Monticello and then the curator of the historic gardens at the University of Virginia. It’s only later that I decided to go into academia.
The continuous thread through my various careers has been an interest in how people have a relationship to place, how people build community and stewardship of place. In the childcare center, I helped kids develop a sense of belonging. At the nursery, I was helping people create their home gardens. At Monticello, it was helping people understand a long history of land, landscape, where democracy comes from, what it looks like on the ground.
People made primitive glades in the forest long before we made primitive architecture. It has always been there; we had to make place in the land before we could do anything else. I’ve always been interested in the people and the public’s relationship to place and land, how we all come to garden. My master’s degree at UVA was on Arts and Crafts gardens in California. I chose the Arts and Crafts movement because it was explicit about gardens being important. I became curious about what it means to define the importance of a garden. And my PhD dissertation was about the women who designed and made gardens and landscapes.
Why do we remain so fixated with Olmsted?
How has your understanding and experience of Landscape Architecture as a field changed as you’ve transitioned from academia, to teaching, and eventually leading?
I was working as curator of the historic gardens at UVA at the moment the Sally Hemings story came forward. This intense story acknowledged that Thomas Jefferson could not be described within the false trope of the “good slaveholder.” I became interested in the relationship of narrative to place and land. Jefferson lived in a landscape where there were 600 enslaved people on the plantation and five white people. The enslaved community literally shaped the land. Jefferson’s work is described by many as a progenitor to landscape architecture as a profession. So I’m thinking, what’s the link between these two stories? Today, we don’t often tell the Jefferson-Monticello story in landscape architecture, we tend to jump right to Olmsted. It’s easier. The “first” landscape architect and designer of Central Park, the first public park. I think both stories are significant.
I then became really interested in how landscape architecture became a profession that was more narrowly defined than it needed to be. That curiosity led me to find that many different women were writing about it, there were Black women’s garden clubs alongside white women’s garden clubs, women journalists and teachers, and so many different communities and people involved in the making of places in the land. Yet, the only thing being described is this very tiny profession made up of all white men. How is that the whole story? I became interested in the profession itself, how it developed, and the mechanics of creating the design professions in the 19th and 20th centuries. I questioned how we came to think the way we do. Why do we remain so fixated with Olmsted?
Initiatives like Democracy and Landscape: Race, Identity, and Difference Initiative, and Built Environment Deans Advancing Change, really aim to shift our understanding of the landscape architectural canon.
Have you observed the impact this work has had on students and emerging designers in real time, and how they approach their work in the discipline?
An early initiative I was honored to lead was called Urban@UW, for which we got a foundation grant to do two years of monthly conversations about what urban research means in the academy and in the community. I would invite people of different backgrounds to come together and just talk. Panels might comprise a sociologist, an English professor, and an architect, for example. From the participation of faculty members from all over the university, I realized we have a hunger to work together towards tangible responses to our greatest challenges, but often lack the opportunity to do so.
My favourite memory is running the Urban Research seminar with graduate students from the history, geography, English, and landscape architecture departments. Four of them are in this robust debate, before eventually realizing they all define the word urban entirely differently. They were completely talking past each other, and it was a moment of realization about why discipline matters. I continued to do these seminars every year for almost a decade. It really does change things when students are able to engage in these cross disciplinary conversations. We can communicate with one another more clearly, understand each other better.
Democracy and Landscape, which is near and dear to my heart, drew from a series of graduate student seminars in which we scrutinized what I call the tyranny of the map. We interrogated what it really means to be in a place, walk in a place. What does it mean to think about the history below your feet? The Mellon supported initiative, Democracy and Landscape, grew out of that work with an opportunity to bring scholars together at Dumbarton Oaks, a research library and center for the humanities at Harvard University. We had the opportunity to collectively create new knowledge and alternative narratives of place histories. Together we built a broader and deeper foundation for scholarship of place that can hold multiple diverse histories.
I really push against the idea of erasure in history. We disguise, overlay, neglect, we do so much to make history hard to read. But it rests in the layers under our feet. Through initiatives like these I get to hear scholars from Iran, China, Egypt, France, the US, those from geography, environmental science, design, asking different questions about their understanding of place, and thinking about what it means in their own cultures and places.
When gardening, you come to realize that you are embedding in it all your own tropes and myths about the world.
In a podcast interview with Tricia Keffer about The Landscape Architecture of Richard Haag, you said “A garden, when it is done well, is one of the most complex systems and spatial experiences we can have.” Can you elaborate on that?
If you think of a garden as a relationship to place in collaboration with the more-than-human world, it’s incredibly intimate. When gardening, you come to realize that you are embedding in it all your own tropes and myths about the world. Am I implementing a formal garden because I’m trying to make order out of the world? Am I planting a row of boxwood so I can have a hard line? Am I letting wildflowers and dandelions grow? Do I pull them out? Eat them? Kill them with herbicides? These are all incredibly personal decisions, and they say everything about your relationship to place.
I would suggest that humans have always made gardens because that’s how we make place. That’s how we embed ourselves best, by stewarding. Gardens are amazingly intimate, and they’re also totally public. You and I can walk by people’s gardens and filter them through our own biases. It’s both public and private, as if your bedroom were suddenly sort of out there on the front porch for everyone to judge and consider. It’s incredibly layered.
Do you have a favourite architect, landscape architect, or project?
The one designed landscape that I always find really interesting, is Chateau Vaux-le-Vicomte. It’s the French project Le Notre worked on before Versailles. It’s an immense estate that was owned by the finance minister, Fouquet. Le Notre designed was the designer of the landscape and he was fascinated by optical science which was just coming into its forte at the time. He used his new knowledge to design a landscape that literally fools the eye and body through the use of perspectival changes. As you approach one entrance, it seems the chateau is taking up your entire visual field. As you walk around it, your perspective changes; an entire landscape emerges, compressing and expanding visually depending on your position. A statue of Hercules acts as a sort of beacon more than a kilometer away. Sometimes he’s far away, other times really close, sometimes there’s a body of water between you and him, and suddenly the water disappears. It plays with perspective and optics. It’s mathematically complex. My daughter, who was six when we visited, heard an American couple saying, “I’m just not sure we want to walk all the way to Hercules.” She turned and told them, “You must walk down there, because it’s the only way you’ll get the full experience!”
Just prior to coming to SALA, Dr. Way was the Director of Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, where she led the Democracy and Landscape: Race, Identity, and Difference Initiative. She was a Visiting Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, and is Professor Emerita at the University of Washington College of Built Environments, where she also served as an elected Chair of Faculty Senate. Dr. Way holds a PhD in the History of Architecture and Urbanism from Cornell University College of Architecture, Art, and Planning, a Master of Architectural History from the University of Virginia School of Architecture, and a Bachelor of Science in Conservation and Natural Resources from the University of California, Berkeley College of Natural Resources.
Dr. Way is the recipient of a number of teaching and research grants, including awards from the Mellon Foundation and Bullitt Foundation, and most recently from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her publications and teaching have been extensively awarded, including a CELA Outstanding Educator Award in 2020. Her latest publication, Segregation and Resistance in American Landscapes (co-edited with Eric Avila), draws from the Dumbarton Oaks-hosted symposium of the same name to examine the role of space, place, and land in the narratives of racial segregation. A forthcoming volume with Carlyn Ferrari is titled “Black Women’s Gardens: as Art and Practice.”