Fionn is the founder of the Landscape Ethics Studio; an academic group focused on exploring the ethical motivations shared and held within the discipline of landscape architecture. The Studio has two main goals, pursuing critical research to reveal and strengthen designers’ ethical convictions and designing to realize these convictions through the landscape. Fionn’s research is focused on sites of confrontation, including political, resource-based, and military, and responds by complicating notions of the good and articulating a diversity of ethical positions relative to our obligations to nature and each other.
Fionn teaches in the Master of Landscape Architecture and Bachelor of Design programs. Before joining SALA in 2017, he taught at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture Landscape and Design, and the University of Waterloo’s School of Architecture. Born in Mapoteng, Lesotho, to parents of Irish and Scottish descent and raised in Ontario on the Saugeen Peninsula, Fionn acknowledges and is thankful to now live and work on the land of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm First Nation.
Fionn’s design, research, and writing can be found on the website: landscape-ethics.com
Education
MLA, University of Toronto
BPHE, University of Toronto
Select publications
Fionn Byrne, “Verdant Persuasion: The Use of Landscape as a Warfighting Tool during Operation Enduring Freedom,” Journal of Architectural Education 76, no. 1, (2022), 37-48.
Fionn Byrne, “Towards a Landscape of Equality: Design of the Palladian Villa to Control Access to Health,” Landscape Architecture 28, no.10, (2021), 107-119.
Fionn Byrne, “Challenging Forms of History: The Dialogic Counter-Monument,” Landscape Research Record 9, (2020), 65-77.
Fionn Byrne, “Green Infrastructure and Stranded Landscapes,” in Nikole Bouchard (ed.) Waste Matters: Adaptive re-use for productive landscapes (Routledge, 2020), 102-113.